2023-2024 Africa~Diaspora Forum
February 2024
Third Worlds Within: Possible Histories of Solidarity and Struggle
February 21, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
In 1880, Karl Marx wrote his friend Friedrich Sorge to ask for an update on economic conditions in California. “California is very important for me,” Marx told the founder of America’s oldest socialist party, “because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed. This “shameless upheaval” forms the backdrop for this talk, which takes interconnected processes of African enslavement, Native genocide and mass Asian migration to 19th Century California as a point of departure for examining historic interactions among communities of color, the effect of U.S. racial capitalism upon these communities, and the subsequent rise of multiracial, interethnic mobilizations against U.S. racism and empire.
January 2024
The Shadow Crisis and the Matter of Defense Funds in Scottsboro
January 31, 2024 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
The central crisis in the Scottsboro case of the 1930s was to keep these boys alive by freeing them from prison. Yet, the well-being of the boys and their families proved to be the crisis in the shadows. This first mass fundraising campaign for racial justice privileged legal defense funds. However, their mothers’ work as fundraisers and the commitment of the International Labor Defense to distribute money directly to the boys in prison and to their families reveals the complications of movement money. In this talk, Dr. Mills offers a defense of an expanded view of defense funds which were required to ensure these boys and their mothers would not be ravaged by Alabama, white supremacy, or capitalism.
December 2023
Critics of the Oyo Empire and Atlantic Modernity in the Age of Revolution: Rethinking Black Atlantic Historiography with Archaeology and Òrìṣà Archives
December 4, 2023 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
In this talk, Ogundiran will discuss the debates and dialogues that happened in the Oyo Empire (West Africa) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries about rights and privileges, marginalization and power, and politics of difference between the metropolis and the provinces, women and men, and the state and society. These dialogues, he argues, were part of the discontentment with Early Modernity that gave birth to the Age of Revolution. However, Africa has been mostly elided from the historiography of this revolutionary period because the modalities of Africa-centered dialogues about the early modern experience have been outside the reach of traditional historical methods. Ogundiran demonstrates the need to pay attention to the Yorùbá Òrìṣà archives and the archaeology of place in order to broaden the historiography of the Black Atlantic and the Age of Revolution.