Contextualizing BLM in the History of Slavery and Segregation

Black Lives Matter: Global Perspectives Webinar Series | Brenda Stevenson, Deborah Thomas

Friday, October 23, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM (Pacific Time)

For the 2020-21 academic year, the International Institute will host a thematic series that highlights global perspectives on Black Lives Matter, involving quarterly events organized in conjunction with the International Institute’s IDPs in Global Studies, International Development Studies and Global Health to highlight key cross-cutting themes.

The series aims to provide a platform for scholars, students and activists to deepen our collective understanding of the structure and experience of racial oppression and the long struggle for racial justice, as well as to draw connections among unique, but interlinked anti-racist struggles in the context of global histories of colonialism, imperialism and internationalism.”

The events will be held virtually, and are free and open to all in the US and internationally.

 

Register for this event here.

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Brenda Stevenson: "Black Lives Matter: Historical Roots"

Brenda Stevenson is a Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA.
Her book length publications include: The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (Oxford 1988); Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (Oxford 1996); The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots (Oxford 2013); and, What is Slavery? (Polity 2015). Professor Stevenson’s research has garnered numerous prizes including the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book in race relations (U.S.) for The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, the Ida B. Wells Barnett Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the Gustavus Meyer Outstanding Book Prize for Life in Black and White. Her research has been supported by, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She also is the recipient of the 2014 UCLA Gold Shield Award for outstanding scholarship, teaching and service and the John Blassingame Award for Mentorship and Scholarship from the Southern Historical Society.
[*from https://history.ucla.edu/faculty/brenda-stevenson]

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 Deborah Thomas: “Can Black Lives Matter in a Black Country? Notes from Jamaica.”

Deborah Thomas is an R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center of Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair (2019), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica(2004), and is co-editor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). She is also co-director and co-producer of two films: BAD FRIDAY: RASTAFARI AFTER CORAL GARDENS (with John L. Jackson, Jr. and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn), a documentary that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future; and FOUR DAYS IN MAY (with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deanne M. Bell), an experimental documentary that juxtaposes archives related to the “Tivoli Incursion” in May 2010, when Jamaican security forces entered West Kingston to arrest Christopher Coke, wanted for extradition to the United States, and killed at least 75 civilians.
[*from https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/people/deborah-a-thomas]

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Moderator: Jenny Sharpe, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies, UCLA

Download file: GlobalPerspectiveSeries-ht-3md.pdf

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Duration: 01:53:11

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Sponsor(s): Program on Caribbean Studies, UCLA International Institute, African Studies Center, Department of History