News & Events

Africana Studies Program Fall 2021 Welcome Back Open House

Friday, August 27th, 10 am–12 pm 
Africana Studies Program Office 
300F Hebert Hall

Please join us for coffee and light breakfast to celebrate the start of the 2021 school year! Meet the Africana Studies Program faculty and director, learn more about our course offerings and upcoming events, and grab some new Africana Studies Swag!

Black [but / AND / or] Jewish:A Conversation on Intersections within and across Communities

April 22, 2021 5:30 PM to 6:45 PM

Co-sponsored by the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience and the Africana Studies Program .

Dr. Mia L. Bagneris, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Africana Studies Program, will moderate a discussion on starting and changing the conversation about intersectional Jewish identities, what it means to be Black AND Jewish, and how Black Jews can be supported in bring their full selves to all the tables at which they sit. Representing perspectives from across the Jewish denominational spectrum, panelists include Rabbi Shais Rishon (MaNishtana), Rabbi Isaama Goldstein-Stoll, and rabbinical school student Kendell Pinkney.

Event Video 

Africana Studies Movie Night Discussion: 
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Thursday, March 25th, 7 pm CDT on Zoom

You've made it through midterms! Let Africana Studies treat you to a movie!

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom! Join us on Zoom for a discussion of the Oscar Nominated film Thursday, March 25th @ 7 pm on Zoom.

Email africana@tulane.edu for more information or Netflix Access.

Movie snack packs for our first Africana Studies Program Zoom movie night are now available in the office (along with our new masks if you have yet to claim yours!). Pick up a fun movie snack pack from the Africana Studies Program office beginning March 18th. Watch the movie on Netflix at your leisure!

Join us via Zoom for the movie night discussion on March 25 @ 7 pm.

Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art

Thursday, September 10, 6 pm CDT 
Thursday, October 29, 5 pm CST 
Thursday, November 12, 6 pm CST

Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art is a virtual lecture series organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program .

Featuring a diverse array of scholars, Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art will showcase research that centers BIPOC people as artists, as subjects of representation, and as viewers. Talks in the series will illuminate the intersections of race and representation, including strategies of resistance employed by artists and spectators of color, in the visual and material cultures of the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean from the early modern period through the nineteenth century. All talks will be presented via Zoom and will be free and open to the public.

Jennifer Van Horn, Associate Professor of Art History and History, University of Delaware "‘No one could prevent us making good use of our eyes’: Enslaved Spectators and Iconoclasts on Southern Plantations" 

Thursday, September 10, 6 pm CDT

This lecture uses the portrait to tell an alternative history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture in acts of artistic defiance. It traces the ways that bondpeople denied planters’ authority and reversed dehumanization by gazing on white elites’ portraits, an act of rebellion that remains understudied.

Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor of History of Art, Cornell University "The Materiality of Insurgency in the Colonial Andes" 

Thursday, October 29, 5 pm CST

This presentation explores themes of loss, erasure, and effacement of artworks in eighteenth-century Peru and Bolivia, positing the modification of material culture as a form of world-making by considering case studies from the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions, which sought the overthrow of Spanish colonial rule. Traditional art historical studies that focus exclusively on fully intact or “museum quality” artworks distort our understanding of fraught periods of history, and particularly rebellions and uprisings, due to severe censorship campaigns in their aftermath that sought to restore colonial order through targeted iconoclasm. This presentation offers new insights for writing about art’s entanglement with political violence, underscoring the gains that can be made through interdisciplinary methodologies for recovering Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous artists and subjects that have been erased from the official archive.

Caitlin Beach, Assistant Professor of Art History, Fordham University "The Greek Slave on the Eve of Abolition"

Thursday, November 12, 6 pm CST

What kind of image can enact change? Many nineteenth-century viewers posed this question when seeing Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (first version, 1844), anticipating that its depiction of a Greek woman in chains might raise metaphorical connections to the urgent matter of slavery’s abolition in the antebellum United States. But as scholars have pointed out, the white marble statue was fraught with complexity in terms of its materiality and subject matter, deflecting as many associations to the enslavement of African Americans as it evoked. This talk draws on new archival material to rethink the Greek Slave ’s relationship to antislavery discourse. Its exhibition intersected the machinations of racial capitalism in the Black Atlantic, concerns that emerged in sharp relief during the sculpture’s American tour and in the city of New Orleans in particular. There, the sculpture’s display was inextricable from the acts of seeing and surveillance central to the institution of slavery and human trafficking. Yet in these same years, the Greek Slave ’s closeness to slavery in the U.S. South would become a flashpoint of Black activism and antislavery critique on the global stage. In an age of slavery and abolition, Powers’ sculpture stood on shifting ground.

So You Want to Talk About Race?

A Talk By Ijeoma Oluo 
Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM

New York Times' Best Selling author, Ijeoma Oluo of So You Want to Talk About Race?, will lead a virtual lecture on September 30, 2020, from 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM about her book with a moderated Q & A to follow. Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker, and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in the Guardian, The Stranger, Washington Post, ELLE magazine, NBC News, and more. Her NYT bestselling first book, So You Want to Talk About Race?, was released in January 2018 with Seal Press.

Ijeoma was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root's 100 Most Influential Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute.

The event is co-sponsored by the Office of New Student and Leadership Programs, the Center for Public Service, Newcomb-Tulane College, Newcomb Institute, and the Africana Studies Program. Please register for the virtual event through the link above or the NSLP Wavesync page. The first 15 sign-ups will receive a copy of the book. The lecture link will be emailed to all registered participants prior to the event.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

With author Jessica Marie Johnson 
September 22, 2020 at 6:30 PM CST

This event will livestream, free and open to the public. Advance registration is not required, but RSVPs are appreciated in anticipation of the Q&A session. 
RSVP to: africana@tulane.edu

Featuring poetry performances by Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa & Brenda Marie Osbey, an author talk by Jessica Marie Johnson, PhD Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. Respondents Eva Baham, Ph.D., Dillard University, Mélanie Lamotte, PhD, Tulane University, and Robin Vander, Ph.D., Xavier University and an Audience Q&A and Discussion.