The Role/Responsibility of the Black Scholar in a Moment of Global Exigency: A Panel Event

For accommodations, please contact the Assistant Director for the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora at ac8829@nyu.edu.

Watch Recording Here

Speakers:

Mbaye Lo is a professor of the practice of Asian and Middle Eastern studies and international comparative studies at Duke University. Originally from Senegal, Lo completed his undergraduate and graduate training in classical Arabic language and literature at the International University of Africa, Khartoum, and the Khartoum International Institute for Arabic Language, Sudan. He also received an MA in American history from Cleveland State University, where he also earned his PhD from the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs with a dissertation on Re-inventing Civil Society-Based Governance in Africa: Theories and Practices.

Christen A. Smith is Professor of anthropology and Black studies at Yale University. She is the author of, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil  (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-editor and co-translator of The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Black Feminist Constellations: Black Women in Dialogue and Translation (University of Texas Press, 2023), among other volumes. Her research and writing explore the multi-sided dimensions of race, gender, violence, performance and the Black body in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the transnational, gendered politics of anti-Black state violence (particularly policing) and Black women’s intellectual contributions to the Americas from the global South.

Michael O. West is professor of African American Studies, History, and African Studies at Penn State University. He has published broadly in the fields of southern African history, pan-Africanism, African studies, African diaspora studies, and African American studies. His current research centers on the Black Power movement in global perspectives, including a forthcoming book on Kwame Nkrumah and Black Power.

Panel moderated by:

Fred Moten‘s primary intellectual and aesthetic concerns are social movement and aesthetic experiment in black study. His latest projects are a poetry collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023), a record album, Fred Moten/Brandon López/Gerald Cleaver (Reading Group Records, 2022) and an essay collection, All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021), co-authored with Stefano Harney, Xun Lee and Denise Ferreira da Silva. In addition to his long-term collaborations with Harney, with López and Cleaver, with Wu Tsang and, especially, with Laura Harris, Julian Moten and Lorenzo Moten, Fred has worked with many other artists, artist collectives, and study groups, including the Anti-Colonial Machine, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Renee Gladman, Renée Green, the Institute for Physical Sociality, the Jazz Study Group, Jennie C. Jones, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, George Lewis, the Otolith Group, and William Parker. Fred lives in New York and teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.