Africana Studies: Future of the Field, October 17-18 |
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October 15, 2013, Volume 60, No. 9 |
The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Africana Studies and Center for Africana Studies are co-sponsoring a multi-disciplinary conference, which is free and open to the public on October 17-18 on the future of Africana studies to commemorate the department’s one-year anniversary.
African Independence, a feature-length documentary film by Tukufu Zuberi, professor of sociology and Africana studies at Penn, will have its Penn premiere as it opens the conference. Penn President Amy Gutmann will join Dr. Zuberi for brief remarks at 5 p.m. on October 17, before the film screening begins in Harrison Auditorium of the Penn Museum. A question-and-answer session will follow the screening. First screened at the 2013 San Diego Black Film Festival in January, African Independence won the festival’s Best Documentary Film Award. Dr. Zuberi won the Best Director Award.
African Independence explores the evolving story of Africa today, told through the lens of four watershed events: World War II, the end of colonialism, the Cold War and the era of African republics, all of which have redefined the continent once wracked by enslavement and shaped by European colonization.
The film is presented in conjunction with Dr. Zuberi’s Penn Museum exhibition, Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster, on view now through March 2, 2014. Both the exhibit and film are part of his Africana Media Project based in the Center for Africana Studies.
Africana Studies: Future of the Field conference panel sessions will be held from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. on Friday, October 18, in Claudia Cohen Hall. Panels will be held on “Knowledge Production and the Fetish of Theory,” “Teleologies of Space, Place and Time,” “Gatekeeping and the Problem of Recognition” and “Black Body Politic.” Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative literature and African-American studies at Columbia University, will deliver the keynote speech.
“Penn has a rich tradition of scholarship, research and teaching in Africana Studies and has been a pioneer in the field, so our new department is a fitting achievement,” said Dr. Barbara Savage, professor and chair of Africana studies. “As leaders in the field, we are conferring with other eminent scholars to chart exciting new directions in the study of the peoples of Africa and of black people in the Americas and around the globe for the 21st century.”
The conference will be live-streamed at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu/
Registration to attend the conference, film screening or both is available at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu/africana-studies-future-field |