UHWIBS.com | Winter Institute for Black Studies

Friday January 16
East-West Center Imin International Conference Center,
adjacent to University of Hawai`i at Mānoa Campus

8:00am	-	9:00am	Registration
9:00am	-	10:20am	Roundtable I - Black European Studies: A New Field Emerges will consider Black Europe and its field of study with discussions about Britain, France, Germany and Ireland.
>			Moderator/Discussant: Elisa Joy White, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i Elisa Joy White is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. White’s publications include articles and chapters on the African Diaspora in Ireland, new media and African Diaspora identity, and African American Studies in Hawai`i. Dr. White is currently writing a book on the African Diaspora in Dublin, Ireland and its relation to communities in Paris and New Orleans, which will be published by Indiana University Press.
>			Mark Christian, Associate Professor, Sociology & Black World Studies, Miami University, Hamilton, Ohio Dr. Christian's presentation will consider the context of Black Studies in the UK compared to the US. There will be more focus on the UK due to time constraints, and on the origins of how Black Studies developed in the UK and whether it has a future in the British Academy.
>			Fatima El-Tayeb, Assistant Professor of Literature, University of California at San Diego Dr. El-Tayeb's presentation will briefly address the challenges the notion of a Black Europe poses both to continental Europe's (self)image as a colorblind continent and to the dominant conceptualization of blackness in African Diaspora Studies.
>			Trica Danielle Keaton, Associate Professor of American Studies and the Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota Dr. Keaton will focus her remarks on the current debate over racial classification in France.
>			Peggy Piesche, Visiting Instructor of German Studies, Women's Studies, and Africana Studies, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York The 'Myotomy' of Blackness: Black Europeanization and European Identity This presentation will focus on the dynamics of black counter narratives, transnational and national identity concepts in Europe in regard to new strategies of representations (museum and exhibitions). By embedding my topic in the recent debates around the US Presidential election questions will be discussed such as: How is Blackness perceived in European debates on (national) identities after this election and how does Europe negotiate the new trope of a so called post racial age? Does Blackness qualify now for participation in a new European identity and will it be reconciled with white hegemony?
>			Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley Unfortunately, Dr. Small will be unable to attend.
10:30am	-	11:50am	Roundtable II - By Land, Sea and Cyber: Alternative Spaces of Black Culture, Identity and Diaspora will feature presentations that examine Langston Hughes in Central Asia, Caribbean migrant farm workers in the US during WWII, contemporary African American return migration to the US south, the Digital Black Public Sphere, and the problematizing of Blackness and contemporary Black identity.
>			Moderator/Discussant: Njoroge Njoroge, Assistant Professor of History, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i Njoroge Njoroge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. His writing and research interests include the history of the African diaspora with a focus on music, aesthetics and expressive culture and Marxism and critical theory.
>			Anna Everett, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara Mediating Obama and the "Where U At Generation": Digital Diasporic Youth and Online Activism This talk investigates the phenomenal transformations occurring in American civil society, electoral politics, and new grass roots activism led by youth with the advent of both YouTube, the premiere video sharing website, and such wildly popular online social networks as MySpace and Facebook, (what we will call viral media), among others. Tech-savvy African diasporic bloggers and vloggers are enabled technologically to be major rivals of traditional media empires. I consider how, for instance, Barack Obama's political fortunes - and misfortunes alike - owe much to young people and the viral media juggernaut they unleashed. This includes the "YouTube-effect", user generated content (UGC), and viral media that are ushering in what Howard Witt (Chicago Tribune) calls the "Viral Civil Rights Movement", illustrated by the powerful Jena 6, and Anti- Immigration Reform protests.
>			Percy Hintzen, Professor of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley From Savage to Savior: Africa, Obama, and the Crisis of Sustainability The system of global capitalism is quickly approaching a crisis of sustainability. There is a growing consensus that the solution to this crisis rests with Africa. The continent is becoming transformed in popular consciousness into the land of freedom, adventure, opportunity, and entrepreneurship. This demands a new representation of the African from one of savagery and abjection to that of savior. I will examine this transformation and its origins in African colonization and black modern subjecthood. I will focus on the "Product Red" campaign where proceeds derived from a percentage of the profits earned by participating companies through the sale of targeted products are used to support the campaign against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria on the continent. The Product Red campaign is discussed as a metonym for new trajectories in the understanding of Africa and the African.
>			Wendi Manuel-Scott, Assistant Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia Boss men and troublemakers: Caribbean farmworkers in the U.S. This paper argues that Caribbean farmworkers cultivated a culture of opposition in the fields. It examines the tactics farm workers employed to counter racial discrimination, harsh working conditions, and growers’ unceasing efforts to exploit their labor. It suggests that farmworkers had their own sense of rules and rights and that these beliefs did not coincide with the growers’ expectations. Growers extolled the contract system because they believed it rendered the farmworkers politically inert, when in reality they were not passive. In fact, worker resistance to the structures of coercion was endemic in the contract system. Caribbean farmworkers acted according to their individual wills, contested the authority of their employers on many fronts, produced leaders who wielded significant influence, and occasionally even mobilized their government officials to act on their behalf.
>			David Chioni Moore, Associate Professor of International Studies and English, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota Langston Hughes in Soviet Central Asia: Toward an Afro-Planetary Vision This presentation will combine an account of Hughes's long sojourn in Soviet Central Asia in 1932 and 33 with broader theoretical inquiry into what Hughes astutely called "Negro eyes" - namely, that global optic which both relies on and interrogates so-called racial difference in the analysis of human affairs and international relations.
>			Maggi Morehouse, Assistant Professor of History, University of South Carolina, Aiken "Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places:" African Diaspora Migration to the New South In the first part of the twentieth century African Americans left the rural South and migrated to the more urban North and West. "Pushed" out by natural disasters and the economic decline of southern industries, concurrently they were "pulled" by the lure of war industry jobs with higher wages and non-discriminatory hiring practices. Many migrants expressed that move as "going to the Promised Land". Today’s urban decay and inner city joblessness has many African Americans feeling "rootless". Since the 1970s African Americans have been "returning" to the South - that "vexed" and "haunted" area that most represents home. This paper will investigate the phenomenon of African Diaspora southern migration by exploring the meaning of place and identity within the writings and life stories of African Americans who explicitly deal with "returning" to the modern day South of "smiling faces, and beautiful places".
11:50am	-	12:30pm	Lunch Break
12:30pm	-	1:45pm	Screening - Holding Fast the Dream: Hawai`i's African American Experience
			By Miles Jackson and Steve Okino
>			Film introduced by Miles Jackson, Professor and Dean Emeritus of the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa Miles M. Jackson is Professor and Dean Emeritus of the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. He served for twenty years in the School of Library and Information Studies, and was Dean from 1982 - 1995. He has over 50 articles in various professional publications and as a freelance writer is an occasional contributor to the Honolulu Advertiser. Among the seven books written or edited are Pacific Islands Studies (1986), Publishing in the Pacific (1985), Linkages Over Space and Time (1986), And They Came (2001), and They Followed the Trade Winds: African Americans in Hawai`i (2005). He writes a monthly column for Mahogany, Covering People of Color.
			For more information on the film: holdingthedream.org
1:45pm	-	2:00pm	Coffee/Tea Break
2:00pm	-	3:30pm	Roundtable III, Changing and Challenging Socio-Political Discourses: Multiculturalism, Transnational Politics and Black Political Arenas will feature presentations that consider the significance of critical race theory in the twenty-first century, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, interventions in multicultural politics, and historical African Diaspora and Chinese Diaspora political connections.
>			Moderator/Discussant: Lois E. Horton, Professor of History, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia and Visiting Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i Lois E. Horton is Professor of History Emerita at George Mason University and Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. She serves on the advisory board of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Antislavery at Yale University and has been historical advisor for museum exhibits and television programs. She has been guest professor of American Studies at the University of Munich and of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. She held the John Adams Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History at the University of Amsterdam in 2003. Her most recent coauthored and coedited books include "Hard Road to Freedom" (2001), "Slavery and the Making of America" (2004), and "Slavery and Public History" (2006).
>			Robeson Taj Frazier, doctoral candidate, African Diaspora Studies, University of California at Berkeley From 1956-1976 Marxist-Leninist-Maoism and the escalation of China's presence as a political and economic international force provided numerous black activist intellectuals with altering possibilities and shortcomings in their attempts to change their communities and the world. Mr Frazier's presentation briefly examines this history and links it and its implications to several contemporary phenomena. The aim ultimately is to indicate how the relationship between China and the African Diaspora has changed in many ways, yet also remained consistent, over the last fifty years.
>			Charles P. Henry, Chair and Professor of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley Toward a Multi-racial Democracy I will be looking at critical election theory as a way of focusing on the historic nature of Obama's campaign and the potential of his presidency.
>			Barnor Hesse, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Critical Race theory and the end of the Black 20th century This presentation will survey the most significant postcolonial challenges that the end of the Black 20th century (early 1880s - early 1990s) presents to critical race theory as paradoxical formations. Of particular importance are race, multiculturalism, globalization, and Black politics.
>			Charles Lawrence III, Centennial University Professor, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i Presentation details not yet available.
>			Mari J. Matsuda, Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i As a critical race theorist and feminist, Mari Matsuda does not believe we are post racial, nor post-racist. We are instead agressively mute on the issue of racism. She will discuss the politics of the post-racial fantasy, particularly as it affects public education and the current economic crisis.
3:30pm	-	4:00pm	Conference Summary and Concluding Remarks
>			James O. Horton, Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History, George Washington University, Washington D.C. and Visiting Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i James Horton is the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History, George Washington University, visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, and Historian Emeritus, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. In 1988-89, he was Fulbright professor at the University of Munich, Germany and held the John Adams Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands in 2003. In 2004-5 he was President of the Organization of American Historians. He has published ten books, eight jointly with Lois Horton. In 2000, President William Clinton appointed him to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and he was the President of the Organization of American Historians in 2004-2005.
>			Elisa Joy White, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i Elisa Joy White is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. White’s publications include articles and chapters on the African Diaspora in Ireland, new media and African Diaspora identity, and African American Studies in Hawai`i. Dr. White is currently writing a book on the African Diaspora in Dublin, Ireland and its relation to communities in Paris and New Orleans, which will be published by Indiana University Press.