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!

Follow us on Instagram for more information!
@africana_tulane

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

For more information contact: Ilana McQuinn via email to milana@tulane.edu or by phone at 504-247-1485
Tickets are Not required

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.

Snack Packs including popcorn, movie theatre candy, and soft drinks available for pick up in the Africana Studies Program office at 300F Hebert Hall on Thursday, March 25th from 11:30 am – 3:30 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.

Daphne Williams, Age about 100, 1936-38

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 online
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 online https://tulane.zoom.us/j/98937431062
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 online https://tulane.zoom.us/j/91351100042
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.