Pacific Worlds: Indigeneity, Blackness, and Resistance
Department: Latin American Studies
Date and Time: January 22, 2021 | 12:00 PM-2:00 PMEvent Location: Zoom
Event Details
Pacific Worlds: Indigeneity, Blackness, and Resistance
Symposium
January 22, 2021
12:00-2:00 PM PST
Register: http://bit.ly/UCPacificWorlds
Graduate Workshop
April 30, 2021
12:00-2:00 PM PST
The Black Pacific indexes geographies of Blackness across Oceania and between the Americas and Asia. Understood alternatively as an ontology, epistemology, cosmology, and demographic analytic, the Black Pacific connects histories of empire, militarism, racial formation, and settler colonialism, as well as shared struggles against such processes. This symposium explores three key themes in Black Pacific studies:
1. Indigenous and non-indigenous conceptions of Blackness across Oceania,
2. Black communities of African descent living in the Pacific Islands and Pacific Americas, and
3. The transpacific movement of Black subjects between Asia and the Americas.
Engaging with trans-Oceanic studies, which understands oceans as matter and being, we bring the Black Pacific into conversation with the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to consider not only the intimacy of continents but also the intimacies of oceans and islands. What new intellectual, political, and cultural work might we explore together when we center the Black Pacific in our visions of decolonial justice?
Symposium schedule:
12:00-12:30 Conceptions of Blackness in Oceania
Moderator: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (UCLA)
Speaker: Joyce Pualani Warren (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Conversation Partners: Keith Camacho (UCLA) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA)
Reading:
Joyce Pualani Warren, "Reading Bodies, Writing Blackness"
12:35-1:05 Black Communities in the Pacific Americas
Moderator: Jayson Porter (Northwestern)
Speaker: Anthony Jerry (UCR)
Conversation Partners: Alex Borucki (UCI) and Sabrina Smith (UCM)
Readings:
Heidi Carolyn Feldman, "Strategies of the Black Pacific"
Bettina Ng'Weno, "Beyond Citizenship as We Know It"
1:10-2:00 Black Trans-Pacific Mobility
Moderator: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (UCI)
Speakers: Nitasha Sharma (Northwestern) and Quito Swan (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Conversation Partners: Simeon Man (UCSD) and Daniel Widener (UCSD)
Readings:
Nitasha Sharma, "Embodying Kuleana"
Quito Swan, "Blinded by Bandung?"
Co-Sponsors:
UCI Humanities Center and Latin American Studies Center - UCLA Asian American Studies and English - UCSD Institute for Arts and Humanities and Southeast Asian Studies - UC Humanities Network- Dr. Anthony Jerry's Talk is supported by the UC Humanities Consortium Junior Scholar Exchange between UC Irvine and UC Riverside, funded by UCHRI.