Narratives of "connectivity" typically rely on discourses about Africa as a blank space devoid of social networks that are unique, vibrant, and continually being modified. While this takes agency away from Africans, it rests on the colonial assumption that "connectivity," just as "civilization" before it,...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/s/81168927411 How do histories of a people get confiscated? And what is the significance of indigenous epistemologies in reclaiming stolen, silent, and distorted histories? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie Professor Shadreck Chirikure's research on Great Zimbabwe, a prominent symbol...
Zingha Foma (History, UCSB) April 26, 2017/5:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB In this talk-showcase, Zingha Foma will present her research project entitled “Afrikan Textiles: Reclaiming Stolen Histories, Identities, and Technologies through Dress Practices.” Informed by historical research, Zingha argues that Afrikan textile production...
Nomi Dave (Music,University of Virginia) Friday, March 10, 2017 / 1:00 PM Music Library 2406 In January 2016, a Guinean hip-hop artist, Tamsir Touré, appeared in court for sexually assaulting a young girl. The case had generated intense coverage over several months after a video of the assault...
Ayo A. Coly (Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College) Wednesday, February 1, 2017 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB In a recently published essay, Ayo A. Coly has argued that the colonial rhetorical deployment of the African female body to signify Africa sealed the fate...
Mhoze Chikowero (History, UCSB) Thomas Mapfumo (Blacks Unlimited) Thursday, November 17, 2016 Book Launch: MultiCultural Center, 5:00-6:00 PM Blacks Unlimited Concert: Storke Plaza, 7:00-10:00 PM Mhoze Chikowero is a historian of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. His book, African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe, documents...
Laura Steil (Traveling Faculty, School for International Training, Paris) November 2, 2016 / 5:30 PM 3145 SSMS This talk addresses YouTube-mediated conflicts over artistic authorship and authority, between artists from the African continent and those in the French Diaspora. Arguments regarding the source of popular movements, and whether...
Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana, Legon) Friday, April 15, 2016 /3:00 PM HSSB 4020 Daily, all over the world, women and children (especially) are abused by intimate partners and family members, friends and colleagues. While a legal infrastructure and legal responses will not end gender-based violence (GBV)...
Lorena Rizzo (University of Bielefeld & Harvard University) Tuesday, February 23, 2016 / 2:00 PM Social Sciences & Media Studies (SSMS) 2135 This talk starts from research conducted in the Western Cape Archives in 2012-13. While working on a collection of photographic albums produced in a Cape Town...
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (African American Studies, UC Irvine) Wednesday, February 3, 2016 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4041 The presentation discusses a key historiographical intervention about so-called "cheap labor". What did calls for the protection of "civilized labor" and a "white wage" mean to the history of race...
A LAUNCH PAD reading of a new play Written by Christina McMahon (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Directed by Risa Brainin (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Thursday, May 22, 2014 / 5:00 - 7:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB A closet. A cry for help. Body broken, mind broken,...
Sheron Wray (Dance, UC Irvine) Wednesday, April 30 / 3:30 PM McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 This is an interdisciplinary dance-led documentary about 17 University of California Irvine students who traveled to explore the roots of jazz dance in sub-Saharan Africa. With their dance professor, Sheron Wray, and...
Praise Zenenga (African Studies,University of Arizona) Tuesday, March 4 / 12:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This presentation focuses on strategies that popular theater artists used to survive dictatorship, censorship, and lack of sponsorship within the context of a sustained political and economic crisis (1998-2008) in post-independence...
Jean Allman (History, Washington University) Thursday, February 20 / 5:00 PM HSSB 4080 Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana’s independence struggle and its first Prime Minister and then President, was a major theorist of pan-Africanism and neocolonialism and arguably one of the most important leaders of what was...
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (Anthropology, Oxford University) Thursday, January 23 / 2:30 PM SSMS 3145 Drawing on her recently published monograph (Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal), this presentation traces the development of the performing arts in Dakar, Senegal, from the 1930s to the contemporary...
Steven Feld (Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico) (dir. Nii Yemo Nunu & Steven Feld, 2013) Wednesday, October 23 / 8:00 PM McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Drawing on their work with Accra's La Drivers Union, Nunu & Feld's film chronicles Ghana's intertwined histories of colonial-era lorry driving...
Giorgio Miescher (University of Basel, Switzerland) Friday, October 11 / 12:00 PM 4080 HSSB The Red Line is a massive fence that stretches over 1,000 kilometers across Namibia and separates this southwest African country into two parts. This fence, constructed by South Africa in the 1960s, stands for...
Katrina Daly-Thompson (Applied Linguistics, UCLA) Friday, April 26 / 12:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB This timely talk reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that...
The IHC African Studies Research Focus is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students with diverse research interests in African studies. Established in 1998, the group meets approximately two to three times a quarter to share ongoing research interests in African studies and to...
Gemma Rodrigues (Curator of African Art, UCLA Fowler Museum) Wednesday, May 18 / 4:00 PM 2135 Social Science & Media Studies Building This talk examines how the making and remaking of urban space in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, are organized around access to land and forms of belonging through...
Farai "Fafi" Bere (a.k.a 3 Percent) Thursday, April 21 / 5:00 PM MultiCultural Center Lounge A Zimbabwean born academic and musician, Dr. Farai Bere focuses on what he calls Black performativity, the performance of Blackness as a political force and how Black performance can be said to embody...
Filip DeBoeck (Anthropology, University of Leuven) Thursday, March 31 / 5:00 PM Pollock Theater In Cemetery State, Filip DeBoeck invites us on a bewildering tour of the cemetery of Kintambo, one of the oldest and largest cemeteries in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. ...
Christina McMahon (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Tuesday, November 16 / 5:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This analysis of the same state-sponsored National Song and Dance Company demonstrates how political powers may work on an African dance company over time yet produce strikingly different results. The debut...
Thursday, October 28 / 5:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This topic will be discussed by Ann-elise Lewallen (East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies) and Mhoze Chikowero (History, UCSB) The presenters will circulate individual papers beforehand (please email Mhoze Chikowero: chikowero@history.ucsb.edu or Peter Bloom: pbloom@mediandfilm.ucsb.edu for the...
Saturday, October 16 / 5:00 PM & 8:00 PM Multicultural Center Theater In the 1970s, during Zimbabwe’s war of independence against their white Rhodesian rulers, Thomas Mapfumo, often called the Lion of Zimbabwe, created the chimurenga (the Shona word for 'revolutionary struggle'). This unique style combines the...
Anna Carla Lopez-Carr Monday, May 3 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4020 Dr. Lopez-Carr is a geographer researching the spatial complexities of urban food security in West Africa. As the developing world continues to urbanize at lightning pace, health research in these newly urbanized areas falls further and further...
Percy C. Hintzen (African American Studies, UC Berkeley) Friday, April 16 / 4:00 PM HSSB 1174 It is critical for the theorizing and conceptualizing of African diaspora to ask the question: "Why Diaspora?" There is much to be gained from an examination of the work the term does...
Laura Edmondson (Theater, Dartmouth) Thursday, March 11 / 5:00 PM Buchanan Hall 1940 Laura Edmondson is a scholar and playwright whose work focuses on East Africa. Her articles on Tanzanian and Ugandan theater have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, TDR: The Drama Review, and the anthologies...
Stephan Miescher (History, UCSB) Thursday, January 28 / 12:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Within the field of African history, scholars have just begun to historicize Africa’s postcolonial era, roughly marked by the independence of Ghana in 1957 to the present. This new endeavor presents significant methodological...