All Are One: Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and the Caribbean Experience Thursday 25th February 2016, 5:30pm
This talk will consider the intersections in the fight for equality in both the Caribbean and the U.S., the shared history of struggles for justice and equality and the influential role of Dr. King in the Caribbean
Smith is a professor of history at the University of West Indies' campus in Mona, Jamaica where he teaches U.S. and Caribbean history. Some of his scholarly works include Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (University of North Carolina, 2014)
Dr. Millery Polyné
Shaking the Brooklyn Bridge: Haitian Mobilization, the FDA and Contagion in the early era of HIV & AIDS Wednesday 23rd March 2016, 5:30pm
Dr. Polyné's talk will discuss the idea of a contagious and infectious black body, particularly as it relates to the 1983 and 1990 ban of Haitians from donating blood by the Center for Disease Control and the FDA. Polyné is co-directing a film that examines this contentious moment that was informed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s, and inevitably sparked historic political mobilization of the Haitian community against racism in a number of American cities.
Dr. Polyné’s research interests examine the history of US African American and Afro-Caribbean intellectual thought; coloniality in the Americas; human rights and dictatorship; race and sports. He has published articles in journals such as Small Axe, Caribbean Studies, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. The author of From Douglass to Duvalier: US African Americans, Haiti and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964 (University Press of Florida, 2010) Professor Polyné was the recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Schomburg Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship and a 2005 University of Rochester Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Polyné edited The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2013.
Erold Bailey
Race, identity, and homeland: The experience of Caribbean college students in the US Friday April 15th 2016, 5:30pm
Scholars interested in migration, immigration and the construction of diasporic identities have long recognized the need to understand how movement across geographic spaces informs the identities and life outcomes of those who live multinational lives. Although there is a robust body of research in the social sciences on acculturation processes, that body of work provides us with relatively little information about how young educated potential immigrants to the US today think about and contest ideas of race, identity, and homeland. This presentation examines the experiences and views of twelve Caribbean students studying at 5 institutions of higher education in the Northeast, USA. The study capitalizes on the need for educators and social scientists to more deeply understand Caribbean students’ decision to study in the US, experiences with race, identity and attitudinal shifts, feelings about being assigned racial labels, and current thinking about returning to their home countries. The findings highlight the acceptance of racial labels except for “African American”, a dogged adherence to national identity, the challenge of adjusting to the US racialized space, the view of the US as an education and economic transitional point for migrants on their return journey to their home countries, the formulation of new understandings and attitudes regarding mixed ancestry, and the defining role of sexual orientation in the attitude towards home country versus the US.
Erold Bailey is an Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in curriculum studies, and computer technology in education. His research focuses on postcolonial studies in education, diaspora studies, and teacher education.
Céline Flory
African Indentured Laborers and Resistance in the French Caribbean after Slavery. Thursday 9th February 2017, 4:00 pm
The main focus of the talk will be on the various ways of resistance of the African indentured laborers, but will also point out the resistances of Indian indentured laborers and ex-slaves, and the links between them.
Flory is currently a Scholar in residence at the University of Michigan. Her background is in African studies which she undertakes at the Center of African Research (IMAF), at the University Paris-I Panthéon, Sorbonne. For her doctoral research, she extended her focus to the history of the Americas and the Atlantic area, more specifically to the Caribbean. Currently, she focuses on the social and cultural history of African, Indian and Chinese workers who arrived under contractual employment, and their descendants. She aims to clarify the political, economic, social, cultural and racial reconfigurations of French Caribbean companies since the post-slavery phase to the contemporary period
Manoucheka Celeste
Traveling Blackness: Navigating Race and Immigration Wednesday 8th March 2017, 4:00 pm
Immigration, as crisis and in times of crisis, routinely cycles through as a news topic of the day. This talk will explore the story of immigration and citizenship, and the ways that race, gender, and class shape national belonging and identity. Using Haiti, Cuba, and the United States as primary triangulated sites of examination, I will argue that citizenship in all of its forms is often rhetorically, representationally, and legally negated by race, particularly blackness. Further, I will explore the ways that media representations of blackness impact one’s ability to travel across national and social borders and become a citizen.
Celeste is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida with a joint appointment at the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research and the African American Studies Program. Her research centers on representational constructions of race, gender, class, and nation, and processes of identity formation, with a specific emphasis on citizenship narratives surrounding immigration, tourism, immigrants, and black women. Her regional focus is the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Her most recent publications include her first book Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora: Travelling Blackness (Routledge 2017) and the article “Entertaining mobility: the racialized and gendered nation in House Hunters International” in Feminist Media Studies (2016). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication.
Céline Flory
Through Revolutionary Lenses: African Hero in the Atlantic World of Enlightenment Friday 24th March 2017, 2:00 pm
Lafont will explore the ways in which fine arts and print culture dealt with the Revolutionary and Atlantic Black Subject of 1800. Questions will include: Did the African Hero of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions get images and portraits illustrating their contributions to those political emancipations? How specific were their iconographies regarding race, national context and medium? Is there any material and visual testimony of the Black empowerment in the late eighteenth-century and what does it mean?
Lafont who is a 2017 Norman Freeling Visiting Fellow with the Institute for the Humanities at Michigan, is an associate professor in art history at the University of East Paris/Marne-la-Vallée. She joined the French National Institute of Art History (INHA) in 2007 where she was involved in historiographical research programs (art and science; art and nationalism; gender studies and art discourses) for five years. Thereafter she became editor-in-chief of the INHA review Perspective. Lafont is the author of a monograph on the french painter Girodet (Paris: Adam Biro, 2005) and has edited Plumes et pinceaux. Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe 1750-1850, 2 vols (Paris: Presses du Réel, 2012). She also just completed a book on Art and Race in the Age of Enlightenment after having published numerous articles on this topic.