Diaspora Studies Speaker Series and Book Signing
Celebrate new publications and productions in AfroFuturism, global health sciences, hip hop studies, multimodal ethnography, and race as political technologies. First free 12 attendees at each event receive a free signed book/CD following the Q&A. Presented in partnership with the Department of Africana Studies, History, Sociology, and Dance and the College-Conservatory of Music. All talks 1:30–3:30pm at the Taft Research Center.
Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women's Fiction
Cassandra Jones, University of Cincinnati
Thursday, February 13
How do Black women writing speculative fiction explore the use of memory as a potential strategy for liberation? In Black Speculative Feminisms, Cassandra L. Jones looks at the writings of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Rasheedah Phillips, and Nnedi Okorafor to chart those moments where characters harness, or fail to harness, the power of memory. These instances transform memory—individual and collective, bodily and archival—from passive recollection into direct or indirect social action. Taking a Black feminist approach, Jones addresses several emancipatory themes within Afrofuturism: the decolonization of time that can be found in fiction employing non-Western and non-linear expressions of time, exploring futurity and the projection of a full range of expressions of Black humanity into anticipated futures, and imagining new worlds and novel approaches to old problems. Drawing on critical fabulation and restorative justice, she forwards restorative fabulation as the mechanism by which speculative fiction offers a healing site for authors and readers to process generational trauma while imagining more equitable futures.
An Acoustemology of the Poetics of Protest in Urban Afro-Cuban Music
Pablo Herrera-Veitia, University of Toronto
Friday, February 14
What should be the format of an Afro-Cuban digital sound-based ethnography? This playlist explores the place of analysis as a muted dimension in a digital text + sound ethnographic artifact. If sound can be described, evoked and imagined but not heard in written ethnographic renditions, then to what extent could analysis be playable, narrated, objective, fictionalized or muted in field recordings? Cuba’s raceless society ideology could be traced back to the island’s late 1800s independence wars against Spain. Cuba’s 1959 socialist revolution, an heir of such tradition, achieved some horizontal unity across the racial spectrum. From the mid-1990s to the present, along with Cuba’s continued socio-economic crisis, the emergence of Afro-Cuban rap has offered the newer tones of a raced critique of Cuba’s post-socialist society, primarily through Afro-Cuban rap subgenres’ lyrical and rhythmical mutations into more dance and body-oriented expressions. Thinking through the assemblage of Lucumí Òrìṣà/Ifá, Afro-Cuban rap practice and lived experience as a Havana-born-and-raised dark-skinned man, this presentation foregrounds the methodological, historical, ideological and ethical implications that hearing, listening, and sound-based ethnography have in understanding what it is like to be Afro-Cuban today. Through a playlist of fragments of selected audio that include Guillen’s original 1964 poem Tengo andPopy y La Moda’s 2019 version of the poem, the presentation draws a broad, poetic narrative with which to signify the lyrical, rhythmical, and socio-political arc of anti-racist protest in urban Afro-Cuban music over time. Arguing for using annotated sound and music as analytical indexes in Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Diasporic, and Global South anthropological practice, the playlist troubles disciplinary written textuality. It explores how digital multimodal formats could be construed as ethnographically complete.
Takiyah Nur Amin
Thursday, February 20
Ohio Under COVID: Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis
Edward Wallace, University of Cincinnati
Friday, February 21
In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits. Ohio under COVID tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s bellwether state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities in a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. Chapters address topics such as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio. Ohio under COVID captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.
Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sport
Letisha Brown, University of Cincinnati
Tuesday, February 25
Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sports offers an in-depth look into the lived experiences of Blackgirlwomen as athletes, activists, and everyday people through a Black feminist lens. With so much research on race centered on Black men and gender research focusing on white women, Say Her Name offers a necessary conversation that places Blackgirlwomen at the center of discussion. Say Her Name delves deeply into issues of gender, the politics of punishment, athlete activism, the politics of Black hair, fingernails and fashion, and the representation and commodification of Blackgirlwomen in sport and society. An entry point into the growing research in sport studies and beyond from a Black feminist lens, Say Her Name offers a clear window into the power and potential of nuanced examinations of sport. As a reflection of the larger social world, sport provides a framework for understanding larger social issues, including racism, sexism, and misogynoir. Blackgirlwomen have varied experiences in sport, and Say Her Name provides a window into those experiences. The book discusses Black women in sports including the South African runner Caster Semenya and the American runners Florence Griffith Joyner and Sha’Carri Richardson, as well as Venus and Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, and Simone Biles. The women in this book have lived experiences that speak to the larger experiences of Black women and girls in sport and society, while also leaning into a larger discussion of the importance of the social movement #SayHerName.
The Boogaloo Brothers
Levant Obulie and Brice Hill
Thursday, February 27
Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity
Christopher Tounsel, University of Washington
Friday, February 28
Bounds of Blackness explores the history of Black America's intellectual and cultural engagement with the modern state of Sudan. Ancient Sudan occupies a central place in the Black American imaginary as an exemplar of Black glory, pride, and civilization, while contemporary Sudan, often categorized as part of "Arab Africa" rather than "Black Africa," is often sidelined and overlooked. In this pathbreaking book, Christopher Tounsel unpacks the vacillating approaches of Black Americans to the Sudanese state and its multiethnic populace through periods defined by colonialism, postcolonial civil wars, genocide in Darfur, and South Sudanese independence. By exploring the work of African American intellectuals, diplomats, organizations, and media outlets, Tounsel shows how this transnational relationship reflects the robust yet capricious terms of racial consciousness in the African Diaspora.