Description

The humanitarian disaster triggered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed the racial violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader U.S. South. This talk uses ethnography to explore the social impact of the privatization of public services in Southern Louisiana in the years since Katrina made landfall. With a particular focus on the quasi-privatization of public schools, this presentation analyzes how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans are being transformed.

Speaker
Dr. Justin Hosbey
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Emory University

Dr. Justin Hosbey a cultural anthropologist and Black studies scholar. His research explores Black social and cultural life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions. His current ethnographic project utilizes research methods from the digital and spatial humanities to explore and visualize how the privatization of neighborhood schools in low income and working class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, Black space and place making in post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

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This lecture is a part of the Oxford-Penn-Toronto International Doctoral Cluster speaker series.

Description

This symposium, “Joint: A Black Gathering on Catastrophe” is dedicated to exploring the concept of catastrophe in American life. While journalists, politicians, and activists insist the calamitous and irreversible threat of [partisanship/domestic terrorism/“cancellation”/conspiracy] matters “now more than ever,” this symposium addresses the relationship between blackness and catastrophe that necessarily rejects pre-Trump/post-Trump or pre-COVID/post-COVID periodization. Inspired by the experience of being on, or in, the “cusp” of catastrophe, this event explores converging crises at the point of cultural, political, and aesthetic transition. This interdisciplinary conversation will highlight the work of scholars and artists as they reflect on gathering as both a moment of volatility and an act of transformation.

This symposium is being organized by Professor Lauren McLeod Cramer (Cinema Studies Institute, U of T), who is the Bissell-Heyd Research Fellow for 2021-2022 at the Centre for the Study of the United States.

— AGENDA —
11:00am -12:45pm: Panel #1 “A State of Catastrophe: Politics In and Out of Time”
– Presenters: Bedour Alagraa and American Artist

1:00 – 2:30pm: BREAK

2:30 – 4:15pm: Panel #2 “The Aesthetics of Catastrophe and The Catastrophe of Aesthetics”
– Presenters: Tao Leigh Goffe and Ladi’Sasha Jones

4:30 – 5:30pm: Panel #3
– Presenters: Bedour Alagraa, American Artist, Tao Leigh Goffe, Ladi’Sasha Jones

— ABOUT THE SPEAKERS —
Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer and DJ specializing in the origin stories that emerge from histories of race, empire, climate, and technology. Dr. Goffe is the founding director of the Dark Laboratory, a collective on race and ecology where members develop stories using creative technology (VR, AR, XR, DJ’ing, film, screenwriting). Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory organization with the mission of creating spaces of collaboration between African and Asian diasporas on futurity, solidarity, and infrastructure. Her writing has been published in Artsy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review.

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer and curator from Harlem, NY. Her research-based practice explores Black cultural and spatial histories through text, design and public engagement. She has written for Aperture, Avery Review, Arts.Black, Houston Center for Photography, Art X Lagos, Temporary Art Review, Art-Agenda, The Art Momentum, and Recess among others. Her project, Black Interior Space / Spatial Thought was commissioned by THE SHED (NYC) as a part of Open Call 2021 and was the recipient of a 2021 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Currently, Jones is the Artist Engagement Manager for The Laundromat Project. She held prior appointments at the Norton Museum of Art, the New Museum’s IdeasCity platform, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She holds a B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts.

Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD from the department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow during her time at Brown. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics. Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster, and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. She has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, Small Axe, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is currently co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press.

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grant Recipient and a resident at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. They are a former resident of Red Bull Arts, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel, CH; and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. They have had solo museum exhibitions at The Queens Museum, New York and The Museum of African Diaspora, California. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. Artist is a 2021 Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA and teaches critical theory at the School for Poetic Computation.

Description

Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (UC Press, 2019)

The book presentation will be followed by a conversation between Manu Karuka and U of T graduate students.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296640/empires-tracks

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016, edited by Patrick Wolfe), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014, edited by Alyosha Goldstein). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Student participants:

Thomas Blampied, History Department, U of T
Megan Femi-Cole, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T
Yehji Jeong, History Department, U of T
Rui Liu, Women and Gender Studies Institute, U of T
Melanie Ng, History Department, U of T
Fernanda Yanchapaxi Travez, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T

Description

We gather together to amplify our understanding of hip hop as a form of Black Feminist Sonic World-Making. akua naru, Azmera Hammouri-Davis, and Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS), members of the global Black womxn-led KEEPERS collective (8 countries and counting!), will speak on their creation of the FIRST comprehensive digital archive to focus on the artistic work of womxn and girls throughout 5 decades of Hip Hop music and culture. Jennifer Lynn Stoever joins the conversation by sharing archival and oral history research from the “Living Room Revolutions ”project on the vital but often unacknowledged role of Black and Latinx women in bringing hip hop into being in 1970s, particularly the way their record collections and home music selecting practices sounded new ways of being in the world for themselves and their families. Producer and beatmaker SAMMUS, will talk about her sound work and perform a short set that vibrates us all higher and farther on into space, helping us to imagine new futures.

—Speaker Bios—

Azmera Hammouri-Davis
Azmera Hammouri-Davis, MTS (aka the Poetic Theorist) is a womanist poet, producer, and visual-performance artist-educator from Keaáu, Hawaii. She is currently the Community Partnership Lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, creating community-based learning engagements focused on youth-leadership and the Law, Education and Justice. Prior to Radcliffe, she became the first person offered the Africana Spirituality Chaplain role at Tufts University Multi-faith Chaplaincy. In 2017-2018 she completed a ten month artist-in-residence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil as a U.S Fulbright Creative and Performing Arts researcher for her project entitled “Capoetics: Exploring the power of movement and word through Capoeira and Poetry”. She is in her fifteenth year as a practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian Martial Art of Capoeira and remains curious about the ways Black women Capoeiristas push us to re-imagine civic engagement and national identity through music. Her research interests include womanist + liberation theology, Hip Hop and performance studies, audio-visual engineering.

Since 2015 Azmera has served as the founder and director of Break The Boxes, a women-of-color led popular-education organization. In the summer of 2020 she became a founding member of theKEEPERS Hip Hop Collective. Azmera is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School where she received her Masters of Theological Studies in African and African American Religions. She holds a double Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Performing Arts and Social Sciences Psychology from the University of Southern California (USC).

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Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo aka SAMMUS
SAMMUS (Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) is a Black feminist rap artist and producer from Ithaca, NY with a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the music and multimedia composition (MMC) program at Brown University, teaching classes on rap songwriting and feminist sound studies and she will start as an assistant professor in fall of 2022. Beyond her creative work, Enongo’s research interests include Black feminist sound studies, video game music and sound design, and hip hop studies and performance. She is currently thinking and writing about the intersection of hip hop and AI, and the market dynamics that shape life for rap artists of color who work within video game music scenes.

In 2019 she became Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, a women-of-color led game studio. In the summer of 2020 she became a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history.

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akua naru
akua naru is a Hip Hop artist, producer, activist, and scholar from New Haven, CT, who theorizes the myriad experiences of Black women through rhyme along a sonic spectrum from jazz to soul. She has released four albums: “...the journey aflame (2011)”, “Live & Aflame Sessions (2012)”, “The Miner’s Canary (2015)”, and “The Blackest Joy (2018)”–three of which were on the label she co-founded, The Urban Era. Akua has performed hundreds of shows in more than fifty countries across five continents with her six-piece band. She has been invited to lecture at Harvard University, University of Oxford, Cornell University, Princeton University, Fordham University, University of Cologne (Germany), Ahfad University for Women (Sudan), and Pivot Point College (China), among countless others. She was a 2018-19 Nasir Jones Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, She is currently a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at

In 2019, akua naru became a Race & Media Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University. Prior to arriving at Brown, she served as a Nasir Jones Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University (2018-19). She is currently a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University, in addition to her role as the Founder & Artistic Director of The Keeper, where she brings her deep embodied knowledge and passion to the study of women’s hip hop artistry. Her research interests include hip hop studies, theater, performance, and Black feminism.

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Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Jennifer Lynn Stoever is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, Associate Professor at SUNY Binghamton, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press: 2016). She is currently working on an oral-history based book project entitled Living Room Revolutions, part of which has been published as “Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx” in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies (2018).

Description

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. audiences gained unprecedented access to music produced in prisons. The professionalization of folklore and ethnography, an increased curiosity about the realities of imprisonment, and developments in portable recording technology precipitated the collection of music by incarcerated people. Published books containing transcriptions of songs collected in prisons brought this music to a wide audience.

In this talk, I read volumes containing songs from prisons published by several authors: Howard Odum (1926), Carl Sandburg (1927), John and Alan Lomax (1934), and Lawrence Gellert (1936). I argue that these songbooks show that the 1920s and 1930s were a pivotal moment, during which “prison music” underwent a series of shifts. Whereas earlier volumes framed songs from prisons as evidence of immorality and criminality, later on, such songs became prized objects of U.S. heritage to be conserved and analyzed by scholars. Finally, they became something people sang in their homes. This process was concurrent with the consolidation of music from prisons into a genre of sorts. Different authors used different designations for music in this genre, but always connected it directly to its genesis in the prison.

Thus, by the end of the 1930s, knowing “prison music,” owning folk song collections containing it, and singing it at home was becoming part of a well-bred, educated, and moral middle-class identity. A complicating factor to this repositioning, however, is that many of the authors involved in publishing music from prisons, as well as the bulk of their audiences, were non-incarcerated and white, while much of the music they published was by Black incarcerated people. Therefore, in the final part of the talk, I examine the moral quandaries created by encouraging such audiences to sing the music of incarcerated people. I draw on Dylan Rodriguez’s critique of the term “prison writing” as “domesticating and delimited,” to consider how the equally fraught category of “prison music” was historically constructed and to provide context for the ways that music publications from the 1920s and 1930s shaped understandings of incarceration that persist into the present.

—Speaker Bio—
Velia Ivanova is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Music from Columbia University and is currently working on a book project about the musical legacy of prison ethnography. Velia’s work has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and has been supported by the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship (Library of Congress), the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship (Society of American Music), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

—COVID Protocols—

In order to minimize uncertainty and disruption to our students, staff, faculty and university communities, U of T will maintain our COVID-19 vaccination and masking policies until at least the end of the current term.
– Masks are required to be worn in all indoor University spaces. Wear a medical (or medical grade) mask.
– U of T community is required to complete UCheck prior to coming to campus (Green screen will be verified by the entrance).
– Guests (outside of U of T community) are required to show proof of vaccination, ID and complete self-assessment (https://people.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-Visitor-Paper-Self-Assessment.pdf) in order to attend an in-person event. Completed forms can be emailed to csus@utoronto.ca.