Professor Tavia Nyong'o---mentor, buddy, and fellow blog nerd--will be giving a talk at UPENN on Barack Obama next week. Check it out.
Senator Barack Obama, who is half-Kenyan, with Kenyan Minister of Foreign Affairs Raphael Tuju
Abstract:
The rise of Democratic presidential aspirant Barack Obama has reignited the debate in America over the legacy of the civil rights movement. But it has not, as yet, brought a renewed discussion of the worldwide struggle for decolonization that accompanied and in many ways facilitated that movement. And yet, Senator Obama, with his roots in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya, is as much a product and benefactor of the latter movement as he is of the former. This lecture will take a schematic look at how decolonization has figured in the American imagination over the last half century, using the Republic of Kenya as a case study. Does the manner in which the U.S. imagines the postcolony now shape what we remember of their struggle for independence? And how does the memory of decolonization influence our conceptions of democracy, as well as our prognosis for the color line in the twenty first century?
"American Memory and the Postcolony"
4/4/2008 ASC Fontaine Society Colloquium
Location: Annenberg School for Communication, Room 500
From 12:00 pm To 1:30 pm
Tavia Nyong’o, Ph.D.
Dept. of Performance Studies
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
Senator Barack Obama, who is half-Kenyan, with Kenyan Minister of Foreign Affairs Raphael Tuju
*
Abstract:
The rise of Democratic presidential aspirant Barack Obama has reignited the debate in America over the legacy of the civil rights movement. But it has not, as yet, brought a renewed discussion of the worldwide struggle for decolonization that accompanied and in many ways facilitated that movement. And yet, Senator Obama, with his roots in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya, is as much a product and benefactor of the latter movement as he is of the former. This lecture will take a schematic look at how decolonization has figured in the American imagination over the last half century, using the Republic of Kenya as a case study. Does the manner in which the U.S. imagines the postcolony now shape what we remember of their struggle for independence? And how does the memory of decolonization influence our conceptions of democracy, as well as our prognosis for the color line in the twenty first century?
*Tavia Nyong'o is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has published articles in Social Text, Women and Performance, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and Radical History Review. His forthcoming book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), investigates cultural performances in the first half of the nineteenth century that staged fears and anticipations of a racially hybrid nation to come.
Hey, who you calling a nerd?
Posted by
Tavia |
4/29/2008