The CPC Africana Studies Conference

Past Events

The Twelfth Annual Derrick K. Gondwe Memorial Lecture

White Predators: Hunting African Americans for Profit, From the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act to Lee’s 1863 Invasion of Pennsylvania

Edward E. Baptist

Professor of History, Cornell University

February 22, 2018 5:30pm Mara Auditorium

White Americans developed a system for hunting escapees from slavery, policing “free” people of color, and containing Black movement in the new nation. Some Northern states emancipated enslaved residents after the Revolution created a new nation. But one of the key nation-making bargains was the commitment to hunt escapees from enslavement. Not only did this help establish a national commitment to slavery, it also helped ensure that people of African descent would face a distinctive kind of surveillance and policing in even

The Central Pennsylvania Consortium, founded in 1968, comprises Dickinson, Gettysburg and Franklin & Marshall Colleges. The consortium promotes institutional collaboration among the three schools and offers a wide range of academic and cultural programs for students, faculty, administrators, as well as residents in the surrounding communities.

The mission of the CPC is to assure and advance the general quality and the intellectual vitality of the member colleges.

Through an annual Africana Studies Conference, the CPC colleges explore the multifaceted and interrelated histories, cultures, and intellectual contributions of Africans and peoples of African origin on the continent and throughout the Diaspora.
The conferences seek to bring together scholars, visual and performing artists, and political activists who are critically engaged in the study and production of Black identity and/or Black communities.

Past Events

The 2017 Central Pennsylvania Consortium Conference

"Looking Back, Looking Forward"

February 10 5:00pm Mara Auditorium

David Canton

Associate Professor of History

Director of the Africana Studies Program

Connecticut College

“Africana Studies: A Discipline Developed from Struggle: Designed to Disrupt and Discover”

In 2018, Africana, Afro American, Black, African American, African/African American, Pan African Studies, and Africology will celebrate its Golden Anniversary. Prior to 1968, black scholars, bibliophiles, teachers, and activists advocated and supported the study of Black history and culture. During the Civil Rights/Black Power Era activists forced universities to hire black faculty and offer courses that centered on the black experience. Africana Studies combines the scholarship of academics with the work of activists and this synthesis has produced three major intellectual interpretations and political praxes: integrationist, nationalist, and the black radical tradition. My talk examines these schools of thoughts and action, how Africana Studies transformed some parts of the academy, but left other parts untouched, and how the next fifty years are crucial for the discipline if it wishes to remain a catalyst of change to bring justice to the world.

Emerging Scholars in Africana Studies Conference

February 11

**9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. * Mara Auditorium**

The Africana Studies Program at Gettysburg College is pleased to present the 3rd Biennial Emerging Scholars in Africana Studies Conference in collaboration with the Central Pennsylvania Consortium. The theme is “Looking back, looking forward” in celebration of 30 years of AFS at Gettysburg College. Invited scholars will participate in a series of roundtable discussions, focusing on Africana artistic and literary expression, histories of political activism, education, and the role of Africana Studies in global contexts. Conference attendees are invited to participate in dialogues aimed at broadening their understanding of the field of Africana Studies. They are encouraged to engage with emerging scholars whose work highlights the interdisciplinary nature of Africana Studies, while also illuminating central concerns of the field. Moreover, attendees will be empowered to consider how their own work and developing research agendas can lay the foundation for the future of Africana Studies. This conference is an excellent opportunity for students to engage in conversations with young scholars conducting fascinating research domestically and internationally. Moreover, the conference serves as a call to students to consider their own role in shaping the future of the discipline, the academy, and the world. Below are the proposed panels:

Session I “AFS and Citizenship: Interrogating Borders, Space, and Identity”
9:00am-10:30am
Moderated by Professor Hakim M. A. Williams,
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

“Spaces of Un/Belonging: Gender and Faith in Tivoli Gardens”
Kijan Bloomfield, Religion, Ethics, and Politics, Department of Religion, Princeton University

“Relationships, Reciprocity, Refusal: Reflections on black cultural values and identities in qualitative research”
Brooke Harris Garad, Global Education and Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education
Department of Teaching and Learning , The Ohio State University

“In-Discipline: Roadblocks and Legality in Zimbabwe”
Kathryn Takabvirwa, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

Session II “AFS and Activism: Examining Global Movements for Social Justice”
10:30am-12pm

Moderated by Professor Chipo Dendere,
Derrick K. Gondwe Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

“Black Geographies in Democratic South Africa”
Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Peace Studies, Goucher College

“Reconfiguring Race: Activism, Citizenship, and Sickle Cell Disease in Brazil”
Melissa S. Creary, Assistant Professor Of Health Management and Policy, School of Public Health, University of Michigan

“African Spring? Emerging Social Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa”
Chloe McGrath, Visiting Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, Washington, D.C.

Session III “AFS and the Arts: Considering Images, Narratives, and Cultural Expressions”
1:15pm- 2:45pm
Moderated by Professor McKinley Melton, Assistant Professor of English

“‘4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street’: Blackness and Patience”
Julius B. Fleming, Jr., Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park

“Gravitational Pull: Errant Trajectories of the Afrofuturist and Black Atlantic Canons”
Mark Lomanno, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music / Affiliate Faculty, Dept. of Cultures, Societies, & Global Studies
Northeastern University

“New Directions in Black Women’s Visual History”
Kelli Morgan, Winston and Carolyn Lowe Curatorial Fellow, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

Saturday, February 11, 2017
9:00 A.M. – 3:00 p.m. • Mara Auditorium
This event is co-sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Consortium,The Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Liberal Arts Colleges, the Office of Multicultural Engagement, the Departments of Art & Art History, Political Science, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Latin American, Caribbean, & Latino Studies, and the Sunderman Conservatory of Music

Black Emancipations: Commemorating "A New Birth of Freedom” in Africa & the African Diaspora

Gettysburg College

November 15 & 16

The 2013 CPC Africana Studies conference will contribute to and expand the intellectual discourse of sesquicentennial commemorations by prompting scholars from different disciplines to examine the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address's "new birth of freedom," and the American Civil War in a broad spatial and temporal context.

Conference participants will interrogate the origins, processes, and outcomes of black liberation movements that have emerged and continue to emerge from civil wars and conflict in Africa and the African Diaspora. The conference will contribute to campus-wide diversity discussions and initiatives by prompting students, faculty, and administrators to consider the American Civil War and sesquicentennial events through a broad interdisciplinary context. The Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College exemplifies how study of the American Civil War can break out of traditional confines. The conference uses the CWES approach as a springboard to draw students from different disciplines at Gettysburg College and the CPC schools into an environment in which they will examine black strategies for liberation amid conflict and the impact of emancipation struggles on gender, language, politics, and economics.

Dr. Angela Davis
Keynote Speaker

Nov. 16, 4:00 p.m., Mara Auditorium

The Central Pennsylvania Consortium African Studies Conference is hosted by the Africana Studies Program at Gettysburg College, and is co-sponsored by The Central Pennsylvania Consortium, The Sesquicentennial Commission, The Office of the President, and The Office of the Provost.

Panel Discussions

9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m., CUB 260

9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Fifty Years Later: Re-interrogating Decolonization and Liberation

Panel reflecting 2013 is also the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which resonated throughout the African world. This panel reflects on the meaning of fifty years of decolonization in Africa and in the African Diaspora. This will be an interdisciplinary panel; the focus will not be historiographical.

Panelists:

Dr. Kelechi Kalu, Ohio State. Associate Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs, and Professor of African and African American Studies

Dr. Cora Presley, Georgia State University. Professor of African History in Department of African-American Studies

Dr. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor in Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Past Speaking Truth to the Present: Language and Hip Hop in Black Resistance

This panel will demonstrate how linguistics and hip hop scholarship provides an analytical lens for examining language and music as a dynamic catalyst in black resistance movements past and present in the United States and Europe.

Panelists:

Jeff Chang, Stanford University. Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts
Paul Miller, Professor of Music at The European Graduate School
James Peterson, Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University

Lunch

1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. “Celebrating the Sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address: A New Birth of Black Freedom in the United States”

A roundtable discussion among top historians exploring how new directions in Civil War era historiography may or may not provide useful ways of considering diverse African American experiences and strategies as they responded to emancipation, both during the Civil War and the hundred years following. This discussion may consider, for example: · Has the term ‘the new birth of freedom’ had significant meaning for African Americans? · What contexts shaped the reality of a new birth of freedom for African Americans? · In the field of Civil War era studies, what historical questions need studying and how might the theoretical insights from Africana Studies more broadly inform our understanding of that history?

Panelists:

Dr. Thavolia Glymph, Duke University. Professor of African and African American Studies
Dr. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida. Professor of American and Civil War History
Dr. Crystal Feimster, Yale University. Professor of African American and American Studies

4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Keynote: Dr. Angela Davis

Author of The Meaning of Freedom (collection of speeches examining democracy as workable only when citizens have genuine freedom and participate actively in its maintenance); Are Prisons Obsolete (a call for a 21st century abolition movement by ending or significantly changing a prison system that has descended directly from the post-Civil War system of racial segregation and punishment of black laborers); Abolition Democracy (published interviews of Davis’s critiques of human rights violations by the US government and “prison regimes” traceable to racial hierarchies.)

the “free” states. These patterns persisted all the way through into 1863—and beyond. However, Black resistance to this kind of policing began early, and shaped politics in both communities and the larger nation. This lecture will discuss both policing and resistance.

Slavery, Memory, and Reparations: Coming to Terms with the Past When Monuments Are Taken Down

Ana Lucia Araujo

Historian, author, and professor

Thursday, November 2 • 5:30pm • Mara Auditorium

On the eve of the debates regarding the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States, and the growing interest in slavery, scholars, journalists, students, and the general public in countries such as the United States, England, France, and Brazil, are hardly able to distinguish events and initiatives in which history and memory of slavery are in play. This lecture explores examples from different former slave societies in the Americas, Europe, and Africa to interrogate the complex dialogues among the concepts of history, memory, and reparations. Although in the last two decades many initiatives emphasized symbolic reparations, especially through the creation of monuments, memorials, and commemoration activities associated with slavery, demands of financial and material reparations, which have a long and persisting history, remain alive in former slave societies. Ultimately this lecture shows that beyond a national approach the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the public space along with the calls for reparations must be understood from a transnational and comparative perspective.

Ana Lucia Araujo is a social and cultural historian. Her work explores the history and the memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery and their social and cultural legacies. In the last fifteen years, she authored and edited over ten books and published nearly fifty articles and chapters on these themes. Her newest book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History will be published in November 2017. Previous books include Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Painter in the Tropics (2015), Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery (2014), and Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010). Currently, Ana Lucia Araujo is a Full Professor in the Department of History in the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on history of Latin America, Brazil, and the African Diaspora. She has lectured widely on themes related to her research in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish in various institutions around the world.

Co-sponsored by: Civil War Institute; History Department; Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinos Studies; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Grassroots Activism: Lessons Drawn from Participating in the Organization of The Women’s March on Washington

Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs

Activist, Designer, Artist

March 22, 2017 • 5:00pm • Mara Auditorium

Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs is one of the leading organizers of the historic Women’s March on Washington. She will talk about how she, a fashion designer immigrant from Trinidad, got involved. Tabitha will also discuss how the march was envisioned, some of the challenges faced as well as the many successes realized along the way.

Together we will envisage the next steps of this global movement and explore student participation, regardless of prior experience in activism or organizing.

This event is free and open to the public

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Education, Psychology & Sociolog, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, the Office of Multicultural Engagement, College Life, the Office of LGBTQ Advocacy & Education

2017 Central Pennsylvania Consortium Conference

"Looking Back, Looking Forward"

Keynote

“Africana Studies: A Discipline Developed from Struggle: Designed to Disrupt and Discover”

David Canton

Associate Professor of History

Director of the Africana Studies Program

Connecticut College

February 10 • 5:00pm • Mara Auditorium

Emerging Scholars in Africana Studies Conference

February 11 • 9:00a m - 3:00pm • Mara Auditorium