African Studies RFG

26 Apr

Afrikan Textiles: Reclaiming Stolen Histories, Identities, and Technologies through Dress Practices

Zingha Foma (History, UCSB) April 26, 2017/5:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB In this talk-showcase, Zingha Foma will present her research project entitled “Afrikan Textiles: Reclaiming Stolen Histories, Identities, and Technologies through Dress Practices.” Informed by historical research, Zingha argues that Afrikan textile production...

11:15 / IHC Research Focus Groups

10 Mar

Sexual Violence and the Politics of Forgiveness in Guinea: Musical Interventions

Nomi Dave (Music,University of Virginia) Friday, March 10, 2017 / 1:00 PM Music Library 2406 In January 2016, a Guinean hip-hop artist, Tamsir Touré, appeared in court for sexually assaulting a young girl. The case had generated intense coverage over several months after a video of the assault...

16:08 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

01 Feb

The Postcolonial Afterlife of Sarah Baartman: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body

Ayo A. Coly (Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College) Wednesday, February 1, 2017 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB In a recently published essay, Ayo A. Coly has argued that the colonial rhetorical deployment of the African female body to signify Africa sealed the fate...

12:39 / IHC Research Focus Groups / Upcoming Events

17 Nov

Chimurenga Intersections

Mhoze Chikowero  (History, UCSB) Thomas Mapfumo (Blacks Unlimited) Thursday, November 17, 2016 Book Launch: MultiCultural Center, 5:00-6:00 PM Blacks Unlimited Concert: Storke Plaza, 7:00-10:00 PM Mhoze Chikowero  is a historian of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. His book, African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe, documents...

12:00 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

02 Nov

Sources and Currents: YouTube-mediated Conflicts in a Transnational “Afro” Dance Scene

Laura Steil (Traveling Faculty, School for International Training, Paris) November 2, 2016 / 5:30 PM 3145 SSMS This talk addresses YouTube-mediated conflicts over artistic authorship and authority, between artists from the African continent and those in the French Diaspora. Arguments regarding the source of popular movements, and whether...

17:30 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

15 Apr

The Journey: Domestic Violence Legislation in Ghana

Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana, Legon) Friday, April 15, 2016 /3:00 PM HSSB 4020 Daily, all over the world, women and children (especially) are abused by intimate partners and family members, friends and colleagues. While a legal infrastructure and legal responses will not end gender-based violence (GBV)...

12:32 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

23 Feb

Probing “Presence”: Photography and Policing in Colonial South Africa

Lorena Rizzo (University of Bielefeld & Harvard University) Tuesday, February 23, 2016 / 2:00 PM Social Sciences & Media Studies (SSMS) 2135 This talk starts from research conducted in the Western Cape Archives in 2012-13. While working on a collection of photographic albums produced in a Cape Town...

13:25 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

03 Feb

Racialized Paths to Proletarianization: Myths about Black Economic Competition, Cheap Labor, and White Vulnerability

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (African American Studies, UC Irvine) Wednesday, February 3, 2016 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4041 The presentation discusses a key historiographical intervention about so-called "cheap labor".  What did calls for the protection of "civilized labor" and a "white wage" mean to the history of race...

13:02 / Upcoming Events

22 May

Stand By (Meditations on Africa and the Afterlife)

A LAUNCH PAD reading of a new play Written by Christina McMahon (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Directed by Risa Brainin (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Thursday, May 22, 2014 / 5:00 - 7:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB A closet. A cry for help. Body broken, mind broken,...

11:20 / Upcoming Events / IHC Series / IHC Research Focus Groups / The Value of Care / Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment

30 Apr

From the Orange to the Gold Coast – Irvine to Accra

Sheron Wray (Dance, UC Irvine) Wednesday, April 30 / 3:30 PM McCune Conference  Room, HSSB 6020 This is an interdisciplinary dance-led documentary about 17 University of California Irvine students who traveled to explore the roots of jazz dance in sub-Saharan Africa. With their dance professor, Sheron Wray, and...

14:50 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

04 Mar

Dictatorship, Censorship and Sponsorship: State and Donor Control of Popular Theater in Zimbabwe

Praise Zenenga (African Studies,University of Arizona) Tuesday, March 4 / 12:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This presentation focuses on strategies that popular theater artists used to survive dictatorship, censorship, and lack of sponsorship within the context of a sustained political and economic crisis (1998-2008) in post-independence...

10:02 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

20 Feb

An Intimate History of the African Revolution: Kwame Nkrumah and the Women in Question

Jean Allman (History, Washington University) Thursday, February 20 / 5:00 PM HSSB 4080 Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana’s independence struggle and its first Prime Minister and then President, was a major theorist of pan-Africanism and neocolonialism and arguably one of the most important leaders of what was...

10:42 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

23 Jan

Choreographic Performance and Politics in 20th century Urban Senegal: a Cosmopolitan History

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (Anthropology, Oxford University) Thursday, January 23 / 2:30 PM SSMS 3145 Drawing on her recently published monograph (Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal), this presentation traces the development of the performing arts in Dakar, Senegal, from the 1930s to the contemporary...

10:28 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

23 Oct

The Story of Por Por

Steven Feld (Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico) (dir. Nii Yemo Nunu & Steven Feld, 2013) Wednesday, October 23 / 8:00 PM McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Drawing on their work with Accra's La Drivers Union, Nunu & Feld's film chronicles Ghana's intertwined histories of colonial-era lorry driving...

10:52 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

11 Oct

Namibia’s Red Line – On the History of a Fence in Southern Africa

Giorgio Miescher (University of Basel, Switzerland) Friday, October 11 / 12:00 PM 4080 HSSB The Red Line is a massive fence that stretches over 1,000 kilometers across Namibia and separates this southwest African country into two parts. This fence, constructed by South Africa in the 1960s, stands for...

10:48 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

26 Apr

Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts

Katrina Daly-Thompson (Applied Linguistics, UCLA) Friday, April 26 / 12:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB This timely talk reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that...

12:44 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

15 Jun

African Studies Research Focus Group

The IHC African Studies Research Focus is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students with diverse research interests in African studies. Established in 1998, the group meets approximately two to three times a quarter to share ongoing research interests in African studies and to...

11:19 / Research Focus Groups

18 May

Harare’s Urban Palimpsest: Radical Performative Materiality in Zimbabwe

Gemma Rodrigues (Curator of African Art, UCLA Fowler Museum) Wednesday, May 18 / 4:00 PM 2135 Social Science & Media Studies Building This talk examines how the making and remaking of urban space in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, are organized around access to land and forms of belonging through...

13:48 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

21 Apr

The Language of Hip Hop

Farai "Fafi" Bere (a.k.a 3 Percent) Thursday, April 21 / 5:00 PM MultiCultural Center Lounge A Zimbabwean born academic and musician, Dr. Farai Bere focuses on what he calls Black performativity, the performance of Blackness as a political force and how Black performance can be said to embody...

10:41 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

31 Mar

Cemetery State

Filip DeBoeck (Anthropology, University of Leuven) Thursday, March 31 / 5:00 PM Pollock Theater In Cemetery State, Filip DeBoeck invites us on a bewildering tour of the cemetery of Kintambo, one of the oldest and largest cemeteries in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. ...

12:49 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

16 Nov

Inspired Collisions, Formidable Complicity: Mozambique’s National Song & Dance Company in the Post-Civil War Era

Christina McMahon (Theater and Dance, UCSB) Tuesday, November 16 / 5:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This analysis of the same state-sponsored National Song and Dance Company demonstrates how political powers may work on an African dance company over time yet produce strikingly different results. The debut...

14:21 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

28 Oct

Usable Pasts: Memory and Self-craft Through History, Song and Clothwork in Zimbabwe and Among Ainu

Thursday, October 28 / 5:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB This topic will be discussed by  Ann-elise Lewallen (East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies) and Mhoze Chikowero (History, UCSB) The presenters will circulate individual papers beforehand (please email Mhoze Chikowero: chikowero@history.ucsb.edu or Peter Bloom: pbloom@mediandfilm.ucsb.edu for the...

14:57 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

16 Oct

An Evening of Music from Zimbabwe with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited

Saturday, October 16 / 5:00 PM & 8:00 PM Multicultural Center Theater In the 1970s, during Zimbabwe’s war of independence against their white Rhodesian rulers, Thomas Mapfumo, often called the Lion of Zimbabwe, created the chimurenga (the Shona word for 'revolutionary struggle'). This unique style combines the...

14:48 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

03 May

What’s So Urban About Food Security? The Why and Where of Hunger in Accra Ghana

Anna Carla Lopez-Carr Monday, May 3 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4020 Dr. Lopez-Carr is a geographer researching the spatial complexities of urban food security in West Africa. As the developing world continues to urbanize at lightning pace, health research in these newly urbanized areas falls further and further...

13:01 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

16 Apr

Re-Theorizing the African Diaspora: Metaphor, Revelation, Recognition and Consciousness

Percy C. Hintzen (African American Studies, UC Berkeley) Friday, April 16 / 4:00 PM HSSB 1174 It is critical for the theorizing and conceptualizing of African diaspora to ask the question: "Why Diaspora?"  There is much to be gained from an examination of the work the term does...

13:27 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

11 Mar

Globalization, Performance, and the Failure of Human Rights: Encounters with Northern Uganda

Laura Edmondson (Theater, Dartmouth) Thursday, March 11 / 5:00 PM Buchanan Hall 1940 Laura Edmondson is a scholar and playwright whose work focuses on East Africa.  Her articles on Tanzanian and Ugandan theater have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, TDR: The Drama Review, and the anthologies...

15:36 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups

28 Jan

The Methodological Challenges of Researching Postcolonial African Histories

Stephan Miescher (History, UCSB) Thursday, January 28 / 12:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Within the field of African history, scholars have just begun to historicize Africa’s postcolonial era, roughly marked by the independence of Ghana in 1957 to the present. This new endeavor presents significant methodological...

12:00 / Upcoming Events / IHC Research Focus Groups