Diaspora Across the Disciplines
St. Clair Drake Research Symposium
Matrix is located on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus, near Telegraph and Bancroft Avenues, just up the hill from Sather Gate. There are entrances at both ends of the building, but only one of the elevators on the eastern side goes directly to the 8th floor. You can alternatively take the stairs to the 7th floor and walk up the stairs.
The Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley presents its 24th annual St. Clair Drake Research Symposium, "Diaspora Across the Disciplines".
Brainchild of the late Professor of African American Studies VèVè A. Clark, the St. Clair Drake Symposium is an opportunity for graduate students, artists, and community members to present recent papers, talks, projects, and performances that engage the African diaspora across the varying methods, media, and styles encountered and engaged in multi- and interdisciplinary Black Studies scholarship. The year-end symposium brings us into conversation with one another about our work in, on, around, and through blackness, providing a platform for the current trends in an ever-growing international field of study.
Dr. Clark chose to name the event after Dr. John Gibbs St. Clair Drake as one of the more radical founders of Black Studies as a field and its institutionalization in American universities. As his work facilitates a pan-African discourse brought into the academy, he is also considered one of the initial contributors to studies of diaspora, particularly from and within the African continent.
The event will be accompanied by a photography exhibition in the Matrix space, featuring “Imagining and Framing Blackness: Visual Imagery” by Malika Zwanya Crutchfield. This symposium is sponsored by the Department of African American Studies & the Ethnic Studies Fifth Account.
Agenda
9:45 a.m. – Welcome: Chiyuma Elliott, Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies
10:00 a.m. – Decompositions: Body and Blackness in the Literary
- Zachary Manditch-Prottas, “Never Die Alone: Holloway House, Grief and the Black Experience Novel”
- Kianna M. Middleton, “‘Looking Myself Up in Webster’s’: Middlesex, Intersex, and the Confluence of Racialized Illness”
- Ianna Hawkins Owen, “‘A woman should have something of her own’: Suicide in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed”
11:00 a.m. – Black to the Future: Foundational Disruptions in the Archiving of Black Belonging
- Stephen P. Readus, “Du Bois and the Diaspora: The Birth of Critical Theory”
- Rasheed Shabazz, “‘Designed for the African American Community’: A History of Onyx Express, a Black student publication at UC Berkeley, 1994-2014”
- Grace D. Gipson, “Imagining a Black Future through #AfroFuturism”
12:00 p.m. – Lunch
1:00 p.m. – VèVè Clark Institute for Engaged Scholars in African American Studies
- Gary White, “#Ferguson2Cal and the Localization of Social Media”
- Sabrina Robleh, “Somali Nationalism & Postcolonial Queer Disruptions”
- Kerby Lynch, “If You Think About It, This Was a Renaissance: A Queer Historiography of the East Bay Area”
- Myles Santifer, “Post-Black Art: The Process of Subversion as Creation”
2:00 p.m. – Dissenting Consent: Black Gendered Labor Against State Violence
- Cherod Johnson, “On Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Gratuitous Violence of the Slave (Wo)Man”
- Ina Kelleher, “Mourning Derion Albert: The Politics of Grief and Loss in the Inner City”
- John A. Mundell, “Rites and Rights: The Re-Africanization of Candomblé and Black Women's Right to Different Space in Salvador, Bahia”
3:15 p.m. – Black Feminist Traversals
- Derrika Hunt, “Cartographies of Healing: Remapping discourses on knowledge production through Black Feminist epistemology”
- Frances Roberts-Gregory, “Loving ‘Nature’ and Healing Community: A Black Feminist Environmental Ethic”
- Nicole Ramsey, “Land of the Gods: Transnational Radicalism, Garveyite Women and the Colonial State in 20th Century Belize”
4:15 p.m. – Poetry & Fiction Reading
- Chiyuma Elliott, Aya de León, John A. Mundell & Jacqueline Boland
5:00 p.m. – Reception (650 Barrows Hall)
Image Credit: From Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table series, 1990.