Panel

Cultivating Belonging: The Haitian Revolution and Black Struggles Today — An Interdisciplinary Dialogue — April 7, 4:30 p.m.

by

 

Cultivating Belonging:

The Haitian Revolution and Black Struggles Today!

An Interdisciplinary Dialogue 

Friday, April 7th 2017  4:30 p.m.

Russell House

This program will bring together a panel of three scholars from three fields of inquiry to engage in conversation about the Haitian Revolution, (the only successful slave revolution in the history of the West) to assess its complex formations, meanings and gendered representations, as well as its possible implications for Black struggles today. Professors Alex Dupuy (Sociology, Wesleyan), Jeremy M. Glick (English, Hunter College) and Kaiama L. Glover (Africana Studies and French, Barnard) will gather to discuss their specific works, which focus explicitly on the Revolution and its aftermath. The timeliness and timelessness of this conversation could not be more exigent as we contemplate how to best envision new futures with “maximalist” potential when detrimental echoes of the past reverberate in our present.

Panelists:

Alex Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Wesleyan U. He is the author of Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (1989); Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (1997); The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (2007); Haiti: From Revolutionary Slaves to Powerless Citizens. Essays on the Politics and Economics of Underdevelopment (2014), and more than three dozen articles in professional journals and anthologies. He is particularly interested in issues of Caribbean political economy and social change. He is a well-known commentator on Haitian affairs.

Jeremy M. Glick is Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama at Hunter College, English Department. He is currently working on long-form essays on various topics including Frantz Fanon. His first book, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution, is the 2017 recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. It was recently reviewed by Slavoj Zizek in the L.A. Review of Books.  His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/Coriolanus & Pan-Africanist Loss. He is also the Hunter College Chapter Chair of the PSC-CUNY Union.

Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, first editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (Yale French Studies 2016), and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelago Books 2014), Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (Archipelago Books 2016), and René Dépestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Allbritton Center’s Election Series: Beyond the Curtain: Campaign Financing, Gerrymandering, and Barriers to Voting 11/3, 7 p.m.

by

Election_Behind the CurtainThe Allbritton Center presents the second of our panels on the 2016 Election 

Beyond the Curtain: Campaign Financing, Gerrymandering, and Barriers to Voting

We have three wonderful panelists: 

                Dave Daley, author of Ratfucked, an incredibly important recent book, reviewed in the NY Times and elsewhere, that explains gridlock in Congress as largely due to the gerrymandering of Congressional districts carried out over the past decades or so.

                Sheila Krumholz from the Center for Responsive Politics, speaking about spending on the presidential race, outside spending – including super PACs and dark money groups and the implications thereof.

                Nick Nyhart, President of Every Voice Center, long-time activist on these issues, talking about possible solutions to money in politics.

Read more

ANTH & #BlackLivesMatter — Nov. 1, 4:30 p.m.

by

Anthropology & #BlackLivesMatter

A Discussion of research, activism in relation to the Decolonizing Anthropology Project

Panel featuring:  Dawn Elissa Fischer (SFSU), Bianca Williams (UofC-Boulder) and Gina Athena Ulysse (Wes U)

Tuesday, November 1st, 4:30-6:00pm, Beckham Hall

About the speakers:

Dawn-Elissa Fischer (Africana Studies, San Francisco State University) is completing two manuscripts entitled Blackness, Race and Gender Politics in Japanese Hiphop and Methods to Floss, Theories to Flow: Hiphop Research, Aesthetics and Activism (an introductory textbook).  Her work has been published in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Transforming Anthropology, FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies and The Western Journal of Black Studies. Dr. Fischer has co-produced a short film, Nihon Style, with Bianca White, which documents an annual Hiphop festival and its related organizations in Japan. She co-directs the BAHHRS (the Bay Area Hip Hop Research and Scholarship) project with Dave “Davey D” Cook, which was awarded the Cesar Chavez Institute’s Community-University Empowerment Grant.  Dr. Fischer is a founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive as well as a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention.

Bianca C. Williams’s (Ethnic Studies and Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder) research centers on theories of race and gender within African diasporic communities, particularly the emotional aspects of being “Black” and a “woman” in the U.S. and Jamaica. She is at work finishing an ethnography, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and an edited volume titled, “’Do You Feel Me?’: Exploring Black American Gender and Sexuality through Feeling and Emotion,” co-authored with Jennifer A. Woodruff. Essays in Transforming Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology explore questions of race and gender in ethnographic research and pedagogical practices. She has also edited two collections of essays on #BlackLivesMatter, one for Cultural Anthropology and one for Savage Minds. She is a member of Black Lives Matter 5280 and the AAA Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence.

Gina Athena Ulysse is Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.  A feminist artist-academic-activist and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist, she is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (UChicago Press, 2008), Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (WesPress, 2015) and Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD, a collection of poetry, performance texts and photographs (WesPress, 2017). She is Guest Editor of Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), a double issue of e-misférica— NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics journal. Her performance works include: I Am Storm: Songs & Poems for Haiti,  VooDooDoll What if Haiti Were A Woman: On Ti Travay Sou 21 Pwen Or An Alter(ed)native in Something Other Than Fiction and Contemplating Absences & Distances.  A committed public intellectual, when the mood strikes, she blogs for AfricaIsaCountry, Huffington Post, MsBlog and Tikkun Daily.

Refugee Crisis Panel #2 — 2/17, 7 p.m.

by

You are cordially invited to the second of three panels on the current refugee crisis, sponsored by the Allbritton Center and the Office of the President, this Wednesday, 2/17, 7PM in PAC 001:

The Refugee Experience

Steve Poellot, Legal Director, International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)

Mohammed Kadalah, UConn Department of Literature, Cultures & Languages; recently granted asylum after fleeing Syria in 2011

Baselieus Zeno, Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at University of Massachusetts/Amherst; Syrian refugee.

Moderator: Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, Wesleyan Assistant Professor of History

 

Theater Life Post-Wes Wes-Style — Thurs., Sept. 24 5:30 p.m.

by

The Theater Department would like to invite you and your students to a panel discussion featuring Wesleyan Theater Department alumni discussing their work and careers in theater after Wesleyan.

Theater After Wesleyan

Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 5:30pm CFA Hall FREE!

Five Wesleyan Theater Department alumni talk about their work and careers in theater after Wesleyan. They include:

Roberta Pereira ’03 is the Producing Director of The Playwrights Realm, an off-Broadway theater company that develops and produces new plays by early-career playwrights. Before joining The Realm, she worked with Bisno Productions on shows such as A Red Orchid Theater’s off-Broadway premiere of The Opponent; the Tony Award-nominated play Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally, starring Tyne Daly; the revival of the beloved musical Annie; the Olivier Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in the West End; the Broadway premiere of Grace, starring Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon, and Ed Asner; and the Tony Award-winning smash hit War Horse (Broadway, Toronto, and U.S. tour). Previously, Ms. Pereira was an Associate Producer at Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, Executive Producer of Yale Summer Cabaret in New Haven, and she produced all the auxiliary events for the 2006 Dublin International Theatre Festival. In 2011, Ms. Pereira co-founded Dress Circle Publishing, a boutique publisher specializing in books about Broadway and by Broadway authors. Bestselling titles include Ruby Preston’s Broadway Trilogy, Jennifer Ashley Tepper’s The Untold Stories of Broadway, and Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway Diaries. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama’s Theater Management program, Ms. Pereira is originally from Brazil, and currently lives in New York City.

Michael Rau ’05, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Wolf 359, is a director specializing in new plays, re-imagined classics, and operas. He has been working internationally in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Greece; and has created work in New York City at Performance Space S122, The Culture Project, HERE Arts Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, and Dixon Place.

MJ Kaufman ’08 is a playwright whose work has been developed and produced by Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Huntington Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, New Harmony Project, Aurora Theater, Crowded Fire, Fresh Ink Theatre, and the Yale School of Drama; and performed in Russian in Moscow.

Rachel Silverman ’09 is the Artistic Producing Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, where she has worked in many capacities since the fall of 2009. At NYTW, Rachel coordinates all workshop programming and artist development activities including a weekly Monday @ 3 reading series, summer residencies at Adelphi University and Dartmouth College and NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship for emerging playwrights and directors. In addition to her work with NYTW, Rachel served as festival producer for PRELUDENYC in 2012 and 2013 and has directed and curated for TinyRhino. Other producing credits include UglyRhino’s site specific What it Means to Disappear Here and 13P’s OBIE Award-winning A Map of Virtue. Rachel served as the Associate Producer of 13P for its final years until implosion and is a proud UglyRhino Associate Artist. BA: Wesleyan University, Theater and Sociology.

Emmie Finckel ’14, a New York-based scenic and properties designer, is currently the Communications Associate at David Korins Design, and has collaborated with Woodshed Collective, The Assembly, and Trusty Sidekick theater companies. The panel will be moderated by Associate Professor of Theater Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento.  An Outside the Box Theater Series event presented by the Theater Department and the Center for the Arts.