2003-2004 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
The David C. Driskell Center Colloquium Series features innovative research on Africa and the African diaspora by scholars and practitioners of distinction. Invited speakers will present their work for forty-five minutes, and general discussion will follow. Each colloquium will conclude with a brief reception and light refreshments. The Colloquium Series is free and open to the public.
All colloquia are held in the Driskell Center's Multipurpose Room, 2102 Tawes Fine Arts Building.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
4:00-6:00pm
Stanford Carpenter
Driskell Center Postdoctoral Fellow and Cultural Anthropologist/Research
Scientist, Friends Research Institute, Baltimore
"Creating and Negotiating Identity in Print Media: Ethnographic Approaches to Cartoon Images, Editorial Writing, and Community Art"
What can a study of the everyday lives, creative processes, and institutional constraints of media producers and visual artists teach us about the representation of community, ethnicity, gender, and race? And how can this question be further explored through the actual production of art and media by the researcher? Artist and anthropologist, Stanford W. Carpenter, will use the unveiling of the art installation titled Imagining Identity in a Melanin-Free-Space as a jumping off point to discuss imagination, representation and identity. Cultural, Ethnic, and Media Studies have long used readership, audience reception, consumption and thematic analyses of mass media and the visual to critique the representation of community, ethnicity, gender, and race. Working from the argument that popular culture, mass media, and history are the means through which people create, manage, and maintain identity, Carpenter will discuss the relevance of ethnographic research amongst cartoonist, visual artists, and journalists in the development of a more production-centered approach, looking at the everyday lives, creative processes, and institutional constraints that affect mass media producers and visual and performing artists in order to address representation.
Colloquium Flyer (PDF)
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
4:00-6:00pm
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University
"Four Centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Continuities Over Time and Place"
Were Africans dispersed or clustered upon arrival at their final destinations during the Atlantic slave trade? Drawing on research for her forthcoming book, Professor Hall will discuss patterns of dispersion over time and place and their implications for culture formation in the Americas.
Selected Readings from African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring The Links. (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming)
Chapter II: The Clustering of African Ethnicities in the Americas(PDF)
The Igbo (PDF)
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
4:00-6:00pm
Krista Thompson
Driskell Center Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor of Art History,
University of Illinois, Chicago
"Tropical Imaginings: Colonial Photographs and the Politics of the Picturesque in the Bahamas"
Edouard Glissant once wrote “Our imaginary was filled with all the vegetation that La Douanier Rousseau had predicated.” French artist Henri Rousseau, to whom Glissant refers, became popular for his fantastical naïve paintings of the “tropics” at the turn of the 20th century. Notably, Rousseau had never physically left France before creating his tropical landscapes, images populated by jungles, lions, and strange vegetation. In this paper, Thompson explores how expectations of the tropics have informed the ways in which many islands in the Caribbean have been represented, both locally and abroad. Thompson uses turn-of-the-20th-century photographs of the Bahamas, which colonial administrators and hoteliers in the British colony of the Bahamas created at the turn of the 20th century to promote the island as a picturesque tropical winter resort, as a case-study. These early campaigns represent one of the first efforts to image any Caribbean island as a tropical landscape of touristic desire. Thompson shows how these representations not only informed a tropicalized image of the islands in the realm of visual representation but that the urge to match visitor expectations regarding the tropicality of the Bahamas led tourism supporters to transform of parts of the island physically into this representational ideal. Thompson concludes by examining how even contemporary postcolonial Caribbean societies continue to image, especially in touristic images, the islands according to century-old expectations of the tropics.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
4:00-6:00pm
Al Smith, Professor of Fine Arts & James Lindesay, Professor of Physics
Howard University
"Time as the Rhythm of Experience"
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
4:00-6:00pm
Robert A. Hill
Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles & Director,
Marcus Garvey Papers Project
"Remains of the Name: The Origins of the Harlem Renaissance in the Discovery of Egyptology"
Almost every aspect of the Harlem (Negro) Renaissance remains hotly contested, and none more so than the question of its origin. The lecture, based on a new angle of research into the geneaology of the movement and its ideas, locates the genesis of the movement in the astonishing 'Egyptian Revival' of the 1920s. With slide illustrations of the actual archaeological evidence, the lecture examines and explains the convergence of the Ethiopianist strand of Garveyism with the Egyptological strain embodied in the self-described 'midwife' of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Leroy Locke, whose role it was not only to synthesize but also to aestheticize the movement. The lecture will also highlight the importance of Aaron Douglas-the creator of the Egyptian-influenced iconography of the Harlem Renaissance, even as Locke himself moved away from the artistic influence of the 'Egyptian Revival' in favor of primitivism.
Tuesday, March 2, 2004
4:00-6:00pm
*This colloquium will take place in MITH, B0131 McKeldin Library*
Adina Williams, M.A.
Community Engagement Manager, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
"Antonín Dvorák’s Brave New World: A Not So Hidden Link between the Great Czech Composer and the African-American Community"
In 1891, Dvorák was sent a telegram from Jeanette Thurber, the founder and president of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Ms. Thurber was seeking a well-known composer who could help America establish a national music of its own. Dvorák accepted the challenge and stated publicly, despite heated criticism, that in order to identify its national voice America should look to the melodies of African American spirituals and songs. Antonín Dvorák’s relationship with notable composer and arranger Harry “Henry” T. Burleigh, who was a student at the National Conservatory, was an important one for the Czech composer. Burleigh opened up an entirely new world for Dvorák. It has been speculated that the spirit of the songs Harry Burleigh sang to Antonín Dvorák—the plantation melodies that Burleigh’s grandfather had shared with him as a young man—are interwoven in the work whose premiere was quite possibly the most publicized and celebrated in the history of Western music, Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9 (From the New World).
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
4:00-6:00pm
Koritha Mitchell, Graduate Fellow, Driskell Center
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English
"Re-directing Our Gaze: An Examination of Lynching and Anti-lynching Drama, 1890-1935"
Many historians agree that lynchers needed audiences; they intimidated by working publicly. Lynchings were also scripted events that moved predictably from forced confessions to souvenir hunting. But if there is general awareness that mobs relied on theatricality, scholars overlook the fact that American theatre relied on the mob and its rituals as well. Lynching provided the early American stage with a grand set of themes, characters, and symbols. Because they recognized the cultural partnership between lynching and theatricality, turn-of-the-century African Americans refused to treat theatre and lynching as discrete entities, and anti-lynching drama is one manifestation of that refusal. Plays emerging from this awareness include: Rachel (1916) by Angelina Weld Grimké; Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918) by Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Aftermath (1919) by Mary Burrill; A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and Blue Blood (1926) by Georgia Douglas Johnson; Frances (1925) by G.D. Lipscomb; For Unborn Children (1926) by Myrtle Smith Livingston; and Safe (1929) also by Douglas Johnson. While protesting racial violence, these plays change what qualifies as “dramatic”—ultimately altering the impact that theatre would have on black communities in the early 1900s and forcing a reconsideration of African American literary history today.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
4:00-6:00pm
Adrienne Childs, Graduate Fellow, Driskell Center
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art and Archaeology
"The Black Exotic: Representing Africans in French Orientalist Art"
Africans have been represented in European art since antiquity. After the rise of Islam in Mediterranean North Africa, Africans in European art were often characterized as exotic or "oriental", conflating ideas about the Orient and Africa into a complex trope of exoticism. At once compelling and repulsive the figure of the black oriental represented the ultimate exotic other, the categorical inverse of the European. The figure of the black Oriental reached its apogee in nineteenth-century Orientalist art. My research focuses on the way that Africans and African-ness operated in the popular genre of Orientalism in nineteenth-century France. This presentation will focus on the figure of the exotic black female servant and the historical lineage in European art that leads up to the flourishing of this figure in nineteenth-century France.