Black Reconstruction as Portal

Yousuf Al-Bulushi
Assistant Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at UC Irvine and co-director of the Sawyer Seminar

Damien Sojoyner
Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine and co-director of the Sawyer Seminar

Marilyn Grell-Brisk
The Black Reconstruction as a Portal Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Scholar. 

Mariel Rowland
Predoctoral Fellow - PhD Student in Culture and Theory at UCI

Temi Famodu
Predoctoral Fellow - PhD Student in Global Studies at UCI

Date: Wednesday, October 19th, 2022 | 5:30 - 7 PM | Humanities Gateway 1030

Description: Jerome Morgan and Robert Jones will make a powerful presentation about mass incarceration in New Orleans and their efforts to rescue young people from its grasp through mentoring and community development. 

Morgan and Jones spent more than forty years combined in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola before they were exonerated and released. While in prison, at a time when it appeared they had no real chance to be free, they made a pact to one day reunite in New Orleans to set up a cooperative business and mentoring program that would serve young people in danger of being swept into jails and prisons. They enrolled in prison education programs, studied law, and learned trades. With the help of allies outside prison walls, they won their freedom. 

Today Morgan and Jones run the Free-Dem Foundations, a non-profit community-based youth organization in New Orleans that fulfills the vision they created while incarcerated. Morgan works as the Dean of School Culture at Rooted School in New Orleans, while Jones serves as Director of Community Outreach and Lead Client Advocate at Orleans Public Defenders. 

Their presentation covered their own experiences with incarceration that they have delineated in their co-authored book (with Daniel Rideau) Unbreakable Resolve as well as a report on the curriculum, mentoring, business start-up, and apprenticeship programs they are implementing in the work of the Free-Demm Foundations. Morgan will speak about his participation in the collectively written book Go To Jail, an archive of twenty years of writing by public school students and teachers, people incarcerated in prisons, academics, attorneys, and their community allies.  

Date: Thursday, October 20th, 2022 | 5-6:20 PM | SSPA 1100

Description: Epiphany presented a dynamic and interactive session from the framework of being a black male creative in America. The students' individual stories were utilized as a frame of reference to understand similarities and differences with the ultimate goal of illustrating the unequal uniqueness of the Black experience. 

Epiphany "Big Piph" Morrow is a Stanford-educated engineer who decided rapping was a better career choice. This community activist from Pine Bluff is a  creative to the core, performing regularly with his 7-piece band. After a decade-plus in the industry, his unique entertainment is relayed through the lenses of purpose, black excellence, humor, creativity, and a global perspective.

He also serves as a "Cultural Ambassador" for the US Embassy, traveling abroad to over 10 countries. One of his current projects is the youth incubator, The F.A.M. Project, and he also has a digital series with PBS. 

Speaker: Rachel Herzing

Discussant: Damien Sojoyner

Description: The past five years has brought great interest and much excitement to the abolishment of the prison industrial complex. To explore the long, windy road to this moment, we are in conversation with Rachel Herzing, a dynamic organizer, thinker, and co-founder of Critical Resistance. Our conversation with Rachel will cover the evolution of the prison industrial complex abolition movement and traverse through the many contours that have been engaged with over the past several decades. We are excited to host Rachel for this keynote event and look forward to learning lessons from the past and gaining insight on strategic thinking for future collective building.

Speakers: Stefan Ouma, University of Bayreuth, "Reading Africapitalism via Black Reconstruction" and Wangui Kimari, University of Cape Town, "Reconstructing the 'Native City': African Fugitive Habitations in Nairobi"

Description: This panel brings together two leading scholars of African Geographies to present on the relationship between their research and W.E.B. Du Bois's monumental text, Black Reconstruction in America. 

Speakers: Adam Bledsoe, University of Minnesota, "The Efficacy of the Unknown: Opacity and Black Freedom Struggles" and Priscilla Ferreira, Rutgers University, "Time is Honey: Regenerative Black Solidarity Economies"

Description: This panel brings together two leading scholars of Black Geographies in Brazil to present on the relationship between their research and W.E.B. Du Bois's monumental text, Black Reconstruction in America.

Speakers: Camilla Hawthorne, University of California Santa Cruz: "A Common History and a Common Disaster: Du Boisian Diasporic Politics in the Black Mediterranean" and Adam Elliott-Cooper, Queen Mary University of London: "Abolition Democracy Beyond Borders: Black Resistance to British Policing".

Description: This panel brings together two of the leading scholars in Black Geographies of Europe to present on the relationship between their research and W.E.B. Du Bois's monumental text, Black Reconstruction.

Speakers: 

Description: W. E. B. Du Bois, meditating on the failure of Reconstruction, wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In this talk, I think about this movement through the history of Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, more famously known as Black Wall Street. After detailing how Greenwood was the product of post-Reconstruction Black striving in Indian Territory, I assess how the 1921 race massacre's destruction of Greenwood was reproduced by insidiously violent processes that include urban renewal. Throughout successive waves of dispossession, Greenwood became geographically and narratively glossed as North Tulsa. I show how North Tulsans' responses to these circumstances are organized and driven by community formation, and how, akin to a kind of reconstruction, they are facilitated through a reparative ethic of restoration.

Speaker: Richard Pithouse is a scholar, journalist, editor, teacher and activist working from Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the Executive Director of The Forge, a space for public discussion, performance & exhibitions in Braamfontein, Johannesburg’s vibrant downtown student district.

Discussant: Rudo Mudiwa is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the role of sexuality and gender in African decolonization.

Description: In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. du Bois contests the accounts of the Reconstruction period that were dominant at the time – accounts that he terms ‘The Propaganda of History.’ His work is grounded in a simple methodological premise: “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.” This talk will, drawing on the work of other thinkers in the Black Radical Tradition, seek to put the question of the human—a question raised with urgency and courage by contemporary struggles of impoverished people in South Africa—in conversation with a critique of some of the modes in which these struggles are systemically obscured and distorted in elite publics via what can be termed the propaganda of the present. It will be argued that the work of countering the propaganda of the past and the present is, to borrow a phrase that du Bois quotes from Thaddeus Stevens, central to “the great labor to guard the rights of the poor and downtrodden—the eternal labor of Sisyphus, forever to be renewed.”

Speaker: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is professor emeritus at California State University East Bay and author or editor of 15 books, including An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Discussant: Fantasia Painter is an enrolled member and citizen of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and an Assistant Professor in Global and International Studies at UC Irvine

Description: During the Civil War, the Union Army forced the removal and four-year incarceration of the Navajo, resulting in the death of half their population. During the same time the Dakota Nation was forced by the Union Army out of their homeland in Minnesota, while unarmed Northern Cheyenne were massacred in their reservation at Sand Creek in Colorado. After the Civil War, six of the seven divisions of the US Army were stationed west of the Mississippi, where they carried out genocidal wars against the Plains and southwestern Indigenous nations, including the intentional extermination of tens of millions of bison. These troops were pulled out of the South, where they were supposed to be occupying the defeated former Confederate states to allow for land distribution to former slaves and for their political participation in democratic elections. Without sufficient US Army troops to stop them, the Ku Klux Klan made Reconstruction impossible, imposed a reign of terror, and restored the ex-Confederate elite.

Speakers: Ana María Belique (she, her) and Epifania St. Chals are founding members and leaders of Reconoci.do, a movement that mobilizes and empowers Dominicans of Haitian descent and campaigns for equality and their citizenship rights.

Rocio Silverio and Dr. Amarilys Estrella, are founding members of the collective “We Are All Dominican” which builds towards a more just Dominican society that legally recognizes the citizenship rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Description: In 2013 the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Tribunal denationalized more than four generations of Black Dominicans of Haitian descent rendering them stateless. This ruling commonly referred to as "La Sentencia" was the result of a series of xenophobic and racist administrative rulings and policies, which throughout the twentieth century sought to systematically marginalize Haitian migrant laborers and strip their Dominican born children of citizenship. Through a discussion with Ana María Belique and Epifania St. Chals, leaders of the Reconoci.do movement, this talk will explore the impact of La Sentencia on Black Dominicans of Haitian descent, historical linkages between the US, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and draw on Global Black Solidarity as a tool of resistance and liberation.

Moderated by We Are All Dominican's Rocio Silverio, with translations by Amarilys Estrella

Speakers: S’bu Zikode is President of Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers Movement), which began in 2005 in Durban, South Africa. Today it is one of the largest social movements in South Africa. Zikode has been invited to speak about the movement in dozens of countries across the world. Writings by Abahlali can be found at: https://abahlali.org

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is an abolitionist, scholar, and organizer. She teaches in the PhD program of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press); of Abolition Geographies: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso); and of the forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket).

Description: In this Trans-Atlantic and Pan-African conversation Zikode and Gilmore will explore the work of one of South Africa's most important contemporary social movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Abahlali is a movement of, by, and for the poor, comprised of thousands of members living in shack settlements who are fighting for land, housing, and dignity. The movement's lived Black Geographies of liberation struggle offer us a fruitful medium to explore both commonalities and specificities in forms of place-based social movement mobilization across different national and regional contexts.

Speaker: Orisanmi Burton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University and author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

Description: Drawing inspiration from W.E.B. Dubois’ pathbreaking Black Reconstruction in America, this talk examines the strike as a critical feature of abolitionist rebellion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Focusing on a controversial, yet little-known construction project that used imprisoned laborers to expand New York State’s solitary confinement capacity between 1997 - 2000, this talk analyzes the indispensability of prison labor to the reproduction of penal order and therefore to the reproduction of capitalist social relations more broadly. It also shows how incarcerated Black people and their supporters beyond prison walls were conscious of the system’s parasitical relationship to their communities and how they struggled to organize effective modalities of collective resistance within and against a highly developed system of prison pacification.

Speakers:
Annie McClanahan, UC Irvine
Nikhil Singh, NYU
Joshua Clover, UC Davis

Description: This hybrid panel asks three scholars to speak about the relationship between Marx and Du Bois by drawing on their engagements with the text Black Reconstruction in the classroom and in their research. How might one teach Marx and Marxism through Du Bois, and teach Du Bois through Marx and Marxism? Presenters will speak for 15 minutes each, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Speaker: António Tomás, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture

Discussant: Steven Osuna, Associate Professor of Sociology at Cal State University Long Beach Part of The Black Reconstruction as a Portal Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Series

Description: Focusing on my recently published book, Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist, this talk draws parallels between Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction and Cabral’s writing on the agrarian structure of Portugal and its colonies. The aim is to grapple with Black Reconstruction’s influence on colonial struggles and global black thought. I will do so by probing the reception of Du Bois’ ideas in continental Portugal and its dominated territories in Africa, and the articulation of Du Bois’ concepts into operative and practical principles against Portuguese colonialism. I will conclude by discussing the ways in which Black Reconstruction still yields crucial insights to grapple with the color line in contemporary Portugal, as the society that harbors the largest diasporic community from the former “Portuguese” Africa.