Mobilizing Blackness: From the Haitian Revolution to Now

From Negritude, to the Anti-Apartheid movement, to Mizrahi Jewish claims to being Black Panthers, to Asian/African/Caribbean coalitions in the United Kingdom, to articulations by German and French youth today, this symposium will address the ways in which “Blackness” has been mobilized to make claims on state and other resources. It will engage the anti-normative forms of living Blackness has enabled. Given these histories and contemporary articulations, it asks: Who can claim Blackness? Under what conditions and with what effect can one make this claim? To what extent does claiming Blackness lead to social change? What are the conditions for coalition around claiming Blackness? Does racism persist, even amongst people of color, in spite of this coalitional claim?

The symposium is free and open to the public and will include a special screening of the documentary Whose Streets? (2018) and the short What Kind of Power Y’All Got (2016) with a Q&A with the filmmakers to follow in Lecture Hall II of the Modern Language Building on Friday, September 27 at 7 PM.

If you have any questions, please contact Damani Partridge (djpartri@umich.edu).

Presented by the Department for Afroamerican and African Studies.

More information: https://lsa.umich.edu/daas/news-events/all-events.detail.html/66703-16770289.html