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October 25, 2018
Samba Camara, ‘Islam and the Musical Expression of Faith in Contemporary Senegal’
Samba Camara is a teaching assistant professor at the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and serves as the coordinator of the African Language Program at the African Studies Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a doctorate in Interdisciplinary Arts, with concentration in African literature and performance. Camara’s teaching and research interests follow an interdisciplinary path, cutting across literature, film and performance studies.
He is currently working on two book projects. One is a monograph entitled, Beyond the Praise Song: Islam, Popular Music and the Poetics of Cosmopolitan Nationhood in Senegal. The study draws from both fieldwork and content analysis of songs and examines how Senegal’s Islam-infused popular music carries and disseminates a Sufi-Muslim philosophy of tolerance as preached in the teachings of 20th century Senegalese Muslim authors. His other project is a Wolof language textbook coming out of his eight years of language teaching experience. This talk is part of the Thursday Jama series sponsored by the Carolina Seminar in African Ecology and Social Processes. The Thursday Jama is open to all area faculty and graduate students in any discipline. Light refreshments will be served. This event is free. Please contact Stacey Sewall for more information.
November 1, 2018
Aretha Phiri, ‘Machineries of Blackness, Technologies of Race: Reading Identity and Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah’
In a comparative reading of Song of Solomon (1977) and Americanah (2013), this paper offers a fresh analysis of Morrison’s views on blackness through Adichie’s Afrodiasporic lens. Exploring the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Song of Solomon’s representation of black cultural ontologies through (gendered) technological innovations, the paper seeks to complicate blackness in Morrison’s work in order to enlarge understandings of, and extend discussions around, the global character and influence of her canonical oeuvre within a broader, contemporary project of black cosmopolitanism.
With a doctorate from Edinburgh University, Aretha Phiri is a lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University and a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. This talk is part of the Thursday Jama series sponsored by the Carolina Seminar in African Ecology and Social Processes. The Thursday Jama is open to all area faculty and graduate students in any discipline. Light refreshments will be served. Please contact Stacey Sewall for more information.
November 6, 2018
Simon Miles, ‘On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991’
Throughout the Cold War, policy-makers in the United States and its allies crafted strategy with one principal audience in mind: the Warsaw Pact, particularly the Soviet Union. This new book project by Simon Miles tests whether the strategic concepts that guided U.S. and NATO policy actually operated on their targets east of the Iron Curtain in the way that practitioners and scholars claimed. Taking an international archival approach, it rejects the trope of Moscow as puppet-master and treats the Warsaw Pact as a multilateral military and political organization designed to provide collective security in the nuclear age, shedding new light on Cold War history and strategic issues today.
Miles is an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
November 15, 2018
Kyrah Malika Daniels, ‘Fragments of Glass, Flashes of Spirit: Mirror Divination and Ritual Arts in Southwestern Congolese Religion’
Kyrah Malika Daniels is an assistant professor of art history and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her research interests and course topics include Africana religions, sacred arts and material culture, race, religion and visual culture, and ritual healing traditions in the black Atlantic. Her first book manuscript (When the Spirit is Ill, in progress) is a comparative religion project that examines key ritual art objects used in healing ceremonies to treat spiritual illnesses and mental health conditions in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This talk is part of the Thursday Jama series sponsored by the Carolina Seminar in African Ecology and Social Processes. The Thursday Jama is open to all area faculty and graduate students in any discipline. Light refreshments will be served. Please contact Stacey Sewall for more information.
November 19, 2018
History Will Judge Us by Our Buildings: Der Nister on Architecture and Revolution
Mikhail Krutikov is Preston R. Tisch professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (Stanford University Press, 2001) and From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford University Press, 2011). His new book, Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Since 1999 he has served as a cultural columnist for the Yiddish Forward, and his collection of essays Tsvish shures (Between Lines) is forthcoming this year.