Upcoming Events
2008-09 Speakers Series
Speakers Series | The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy presents:
Scot Brown
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of California Los Angeles
“ 'A Fantastic Voyage': Funk Music in Dayton, Ohio and Politics of African American Community--From the Ohio Players to Roger Troutman”
Friday 26 September, 2008
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
Location: Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall
Scot Brown is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Abstract: Funk, a fusion of jazz, rhythm and blues and rock was a national trend in African American music during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, with regionally specific styles and forms of expression. A disproportionately large number of commercially successful funk bands came from Dayton, Ohio during the 1970s and early 1980sa period in which African Americans comprised over one-third of a population of approximately 200,000. Artists such the Ohio Players, Lakeside, Slave, Aurra, Heatwave, Sun, Roger, Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame and Zapp were products a deeply embedded, local funk music culture--buttressed by an array of interlocking social institutions. This talk will explore key elements of the ‘pedagogy of the funk’ in Dayton, a community-driven pedagogy, sustained by a host of networks between teachers, students, and the local public sphere.
Speakers Series | The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy presents:
Toure Reed
Associate Professor, Department of History, Illinois State University
“Civil Rights and the Fight Against 'Social Disorganization': The Urban League and Black Middle Class Reform”
Friday 7 November 2008
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
Location: Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Touré Reed is an associate professor of History at Illinois State University.
Speakers Series | The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy presents:
George Reid Andrews
Distinguished Professor of History, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh
“Racial Politics in a Racial Democracy: Afro-Brazilian Civil Rights Movements, 1945-Present”
Friday 20 February 2009
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
Location: Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall
Abstract: George Reid Andrews is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. His publications include Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (2004), Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (1991) and The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 (1980). He is currently writing a history of Afro-Uruguayan political and cultural movements from the mid-1800s to the present.
With over 80 million inhabitants of African ancestry, Brazil is the single largest component of the world African diaspora. Since the abolition of slavery in 1888, Afro-Brazilians have mobilized in a series of movements seeking social, economic, and political equality. Those movements offer fascinating points of comparison and connection with African-American movements in the United States, including, most recently, current debates in Brazil over affirmative action programs adopted in the last five years by universities and government agencies. This talk will consider some of the principal forms of Afro-Brazilian political mobilization since World War II, the successes and failures of those movements, and the current state of racial politics in Brazil.
Speakers Series | The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy presents:
John Wess Grant
CAUSE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2008-09, and Assistant Professor, Department of Africana Studies, the University of Arizona
“Stranded Families in an Urban Space: Black Community Formation in Richmond, Virginia and Monrovia, Liberia, 1817-1870”
Friday 20 March 2009
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
Location: Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall
Abstract: Sociologists and historians have long found it difficult to explain the improvisational process of black family and community formation in the slaveholding societies of the American South. John Grant¹s lecture examines the emergence of what he calls the “stranded family,” an improvisational type of black family, in the urban space of Richmond, Virginia. Stranded families were tight-knit nuclear or loosely connected extended social networks of enslaved and free black members. Dr. Grant argues that these families adopted “a family first” logic. This family orientation tied them to the region and undercut their ability to improve their fortunes through migration or emigration to less hostile locations, including other black communities in the American Upper South as well as Monrovia and Greater Liberia. The family first logic exercised by free black members of stranded families also illustrates how they discarded white liberal definitions of freedom emphasizing individual autonomy and instead adopted new ones designed to protect the integrity of black social networks against the pitfalls of chattel bondage.