Events
Rodell Warner - Artifical Archive: GWB 2.206, April 23, 3:00pm
Artist talk by Rodell Warner, followed by a conversation between him and Dr. Eddie Chambers
Art Galleries at Black Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Caribbeanist Labs on Religion will host an artist talk by Rodell Warner, which will be followed by a conversation between him and Dr. Eddie Chambers.
Event will be Tuesday, April 23, 3pm at the Art Galleries at the Gordon-White Building (GWB) 2.206. Details for registration are at https://www.galleriesatut.org/public-programs/public-conversation-michael-a-booker-and-deborah-roberts-shlc6
Deborah Thomas (UPenn) Public Lecture: RLP 1.302B, Oct. 6th, 2:30-4:00pm
SURRENDER: The Death of the West, Caribbean World-Building, and the Future of Us All
How can one imagine sovereignty in a context in which the specter of Black death on the plantation remains an ordinary parameter for organizing social and economic value? How can one enact self-determination when new forms of dispossession are continuously rewritten over earlier removals and displacements? These questions suffuse our engagements with notions of freedom, liberation, and justice, and seem to negate the possibility of sovereignty in Black life, insofar as sovereignty remains tethered to the state, or to the parameters of its institutions. In this talk, I will argue that reaching toward a sovereignty “otherwise” requires that we plumb other terms that might afford a clearer articulation of the histories and futures of (in this case) Caribbean freedom. I will posit “possession” as a kind of companion term to sovereignty, one that both aligns with and disrupts imperialist and nationalist aspirations, and one that will ultimately lead us to another term, “surrender,” which can attune us to relations of repetition, recovery, return, and repair.
Deborah Thomas (UPenn) and Nadia Mosquera Muriel (UT Austin) in Conversation, Workshop: BUR 554, Oct. 6th, 10am-12pm.
Dr. Mosquera’s paper examines the entanglement of Blackness, ideas of skin color and racial identity, and the questioning of religious and Afro-Catholic cultural expressions amongst Afro-Latin American populations. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic research in Venezuela's central coast, Dr. Mosquera examines Afro-Venezuelan festivals organized around the figures of patron saints such as San Juan Bautista, San Benito de Palermo, and San Juan Congo as sites that reveal how Afro-Venezuelan cultural and political activists question the ideological fiction of racial democracy in Venezuela. Dr. Mosquera argues that practices of refusal and interrogation of colonial legacies attributed to religious iconography in Venezuela channel fresh cultural contestations against white supremacy embedded in the narrative of racial mixture or mestizaje in Latin America. Against ideas of “syncretism,” Mosquera proposes a paradigm of “parallelism” to understand Afro-Venezuelan religious politics in Venezuela.