Troubling the Grounds:
Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity
University of California, Irvine
24 – 25 May 2019
RSVP HERE
Friday, May 24 – SBSG 1321
08:00 — 8:30 Registration & Refreshments
08:30 — 09:00 Introduction & Land Acknowledgment
09:00 — 10:30 Kinship and Fugitivity
Tiffany Lethabo King (Georgia State University), “A Ceremony for Sycorax”
Chad Infante (University of Maryland, College Park), “Metaphor and Metaphysis: Literature and The Etiological Debate between Black and Native Studies”
Sarah Fong (USC), “Place, Placeless-ness, and Relational Racial Formations”
Jaimie Crumley (UCLA), “Slave, Stranger: Kinship and Freedom Among Antebellum African Americans”
Moderator: Sandra Harvey (UCI)
10:40 — 12:10 Performing and Historicizing Blackness
Nicole Ramsey (UC Berkeley), “Performing Blackness, Indigeneity and the Belizean Nation”
Caree Banton (University of Arkansas), “Barbadian Emigration to Liberia: Making of Citizenship and Blackness in an African Republic”
Sureshi M. Jayawardene (San Diego State University), “Black Sri Lanka: How ‘Ceylon Africans’ Recode Racialized Space and Place in Sri Lanka”
Moderator: SA Smythe
12:15 — 13:30 Lunch
13:40 — 15:10 Wakanda and the Natural World
Jaqueline Scott (University of Toronto), “Outdoors Recreation and Black Alienation from Nature”
Camilo Romero (ReGeneración Colombia), “Wakanda vs. Agbogbloshie”
Cherrie Kandie (Dartmouth), “Kifo Kisimani and the Narratogical Function of Black Panther’s Vibranium”
Moderator: Esme Murdock (SDSU)
15:15 — 15:30 Coffee Break
15:30 — 17:00 Decolonization, Ritual, and Resistance
Bryce Henson (University of Florida), “Diasporic Fugitivity: Quilombismo Politics and Black Social Life in Contemporary Brazil”
Xhercis Méndez (CSU Fullerton), “Tracing the Decolonial (Feminist) Circuits of Afro-Latinx/Diasporic Ritual Praxis”
Adrienne Roseanna Hall (SFSU), Maurício Polidoro and Daniel Canavese de Oliveira (IFRGS), “‘Quilombo with a K’: Kilombola Landscapes as Geographies of Black Resistance”
Moderator: Aisha Finch (UCLA)
17:00 — 18:30 Keynote, Boatema Boateng (UCSD)
“Black Indigeneities and Regimes of Sovereignty”
19:30 — 21:30 Dinner
Saturday, 25 May – SBSG 1517
09:30 — 10:15 Registration & Refreshments
10:15 — 11:30 Contagion, Migratization, and Belonging in Europe
Keelyn Bradley (The European Graduate School), “Counting T-Cells on the Shores of Other Countries: HIV/AIDS, Black Virtual Bodies, and the Geography of Contagion”
Taryn Marcelino (UCLA), “Diam’s: Under the Shadows”
Alyosxa Tudor (SOAS), “Troubling Certainties of Belonging: Cross-Fadings of Racialisation and Migratisation”
Moderator: Fatima El-Tayeb (UC San Diego)
11:40 — 13:10 Blackness and Indigeneity Across Turtle Island
Kai Pyle (Michif/Nishnaabe) (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), “Narrating Blackness in Native American writing before 1970”
Shaista Patel (UC San Diego), “Reading the Buffalo as an Unlikely Archive: Raising Questions About South Asian Complicity in White Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness”
Kyle Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) (UCLA), “The Mobility of Belonging: How Black People Construct Indigeneity on Turtle Island”
Andrew Jolivette (Creole/Opelousa, Choctaw, Atakapa-Ishak) (San Francisco State/UC San Diego), “Queer Indigenous Citizenship: Against Settler Violence and Anti-Blackness”
Moderator: Tiffany Lethabo King (Georgia State University)
13:15 — 14:30 Lunch
14:40 — 16:10 Sovereignty and Memory on the Continent
Alirio Karina (UC Santa Cruz), “Provisional Notes on the Neocolony”
O. Diane Enbabor (independent researcher), “African Contemporary Art as Post-Colonial Negation toward Anti-Colonial African Futures: A Survey of the work of Nastio Mosquito and Ayanda Mabulu”
vangile gantsho (impepho press), “Sizilebel’uba Sizalwa Ngobani: We Have Forgotten Whose Children We Are”
Moderator: Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (UCI)
16:15 — 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 — 18:30 Troubling the Grounds: Closing Roundtable
Fatima El-Tayeb (Literature and Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego)
Sandra Harvey (African American Studies, UC Irvine)
Kyle Mays (African American Studies, UCLA)
Sherene Seikaly (History, UC Santa Barbara)
SA Smythe (Anthropology, UCI & African American Studies, UCLA)
