Announcements
Former Graduate receives Susie Pryor Award
Congratulations to John Adams (M.A. ’03) who received the Susie Pryor Award by the Arkansas Women’s History Institute. The Susie Pryor Award in Arkansas Women’s History offers an annual prize of $1,000 for the best unpublished essay on topics in Arkansas women’s history. Manuscripts are reviewed on their contributions to knowledge of women in Arkansas history, use of primary and secondary materials, creative interpretation, originality, and stylistic excellence.
2012 Lorraine Hansberry Symposium
Conversations on African American Youth and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Patrick Sims facilitating a panel during the March 3, 2012 symposium on August Wilson's play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," in the Mitchell Theater. From Left to right:Patrick Sims, Rev .Dr. Alex Gee, Jerome Dillard, Rev. Rick Jones, and Robert Agnew. (Photo by Jonathan Gramling)
Kouadio Germain N'Guessan's Book Published
The Department often hosts international scholars under the Fulbright Program. Professor Kouadio Germain N'Guessan was here in 2010 during which he completed work on his book, titled "The Dynamics of Politics and Didacticism in Frances E. W. Harper's Writing." This photo is of him back home in the Ivory Coast, holding a copy of his book. Congratulations, Kouadio!
August Wilson: The Legacy and his Challenges
Anthony Hill -Professor Emeritus of Theater Ohio State University - will speak
Saturday, March 3,2012 at 2:00 p.m. at Mitchell Theatre in Vilas Communications Hall
Sponsored, in part by The Department of Afro-American Studies
The Department of Afro-American Studies joins in sponsoring the lecture by Dr. Lowery Sims of the Museum of Arts & Design in NYC
The Global Africa Project, organized in 2010 by the Museum of Arts & Design focused on aspects of design and art by individuals working in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States and the Caribbean. The exhibition challenged presumptions of what constitutes an “African” style or aesthetic by focusing on the inherently migratory nature of identity as it plays out in contemporary society. In addition the exhibition examined the rapid and pervasive interchange in contemporary practice and sought out the rich pool of new talent that is emerging from the African continent and from Africans working across the globe. This lecture will examine the curatorial process involved in conceptualizing and realizing a project that included over 100 creators from over 40 countries. By including work by designers, craftsmen and artists working both in traditional or contemporary modes the exhibition challenged the usual distinction made between “professional” and “artisan” in the art market. It also highlighted the economic and social issues navigated by these artists as they negotiate their careers both “in-country” and outside mainstream center and on in the global arena, and illuminate how these creators are able to engage the contemporary art market in inventive and provocative ways.
Professor Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis among artists showing in Compendium 2012: Art Department Faculty Exhibition currently showing at the Chazen.
February 4 to April 1, 2012
Rowland Galleries, Garfield Gallery, Mayer Gallery
About every four years, the museum hosts an exhibition of current work by the UW–Madison Art Department faculty, affiliates, and emeriti. Compendium 2012 represents the breadth and scope of contemporary art today and highlights the diversity of this dynamic faculty. Work by 34 current faculty, staff, and affiliates, as well as 12 emeritus faculty, showcases the vibrant talent and history of the department.
Spring Course Offerings
AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES 677
Critical Perspectives on Black Women’s Writing
Spring, 2012/Sandra Adell, Professor
5:30-8:10 pm, Room 4208 Helen C. White Hall
COURSE DESCRIPTION
In 1982 the Feminist Press published what has become a founding text for Black Women’s Studies. It has a long title, but that title speaks volumes about the struggles black women have had to endure, both personally and professionally, to gain visibility and to have their voices heard above the academic clamor that, until the 1980s, was decidedly masculine. Edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Braves, is something of a manifesto for Black feminism and a primer on teaching about the experiences of Black Women in the United States. We will start by reading selected essays from the collection. We then will read fiction, poetry and drama by black women writers who have helped to pave the way for what by the mid-1990s became something of a publishing boom for black women, much of it precipitated by the growth and development of black women’s studies as an academic discipline. We will end with a reflection on what is happening with the publishing industry today in light of the ever growing popularity of what is called Urban Fiction.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
This course meets once a week. You are therefore expected to attend all sessions. Miss more than one class and you risk having your final grade dropped. In addition to two short written assignments, you each will be required to give an oral presentation on a critical essay about one of the writers we are studying and write final research paper. You will be given more information about the final project and other assignments during the first week of class.
REQUIRED READINGS
Books for this course are available at A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN FEMINIST BOOKSTORE (307 W. Johnson Street, 608.257.7888). I also will assigned critical essays about some of these authors and their work.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Selected poems (course handouts)
Childress, Alice Selected Plays
Clarke, Cheryl After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
Giovanni Nikki. Selected poems (course handouts)
Hansberry, Lorraine A Raisin in the Sun
Hull, Gloria, et.al But Some of us Are Brave
Jones, Gayle The Healing
Morrison, Toni The Bluest Eye
Nunez, Elizabeth Boundaries
Petry, Anne The Street
Shange, Ntozake For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.
Wall, Cheryl Changing Our Own Words
AAS 672 Selected Topics:Afro-American Literature: Narratives of Black Embodiment
In this class we will consider how black authors narrate the particularities of existence with a focus on the effects of their particular incarnations. How do writers frame characters' relationships with their own bodies? Does Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness resonate to the same degree that it did when he developed it? Does it matter whether mistaken identity takes the form of being confused for a particular person or being or being confused for a type? Is passing a phenomenon that has evolved? Do racial differences take precedence over other identity markers? In this seminar we will consider these questions and more across several genres. Students should expect to participate fully. The course includes presentations and papers. Experience writing about literature is necessary. (Taught by Professor Tracy Curtis)
D. Nebi Hilliard to Speak November 9, 2011 ~ 5:00 p.m.
Divas to the Dancefloor: Black Masculinities in the 21st Century
At the Multicultural Student Center in the Red Gym
Rhodessa Jones to Visit UW November 16 and 17, 2011.
Rhodessa Jones is an internationally acclaimed actor, writer, singer and Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco-based performance company, Cultural Odyssey. She is also the founder and director of the “Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.” She has worked with incarcerated women in the United States, Russia and South Africa over the past twenty years, bringing them an opportunity to discover, through theater, new ways of engaging with themselves and others that might help them as they re-enter the world outside and set new goals for themselves and their families. Rhodessa Jones was the first artist-in-residence at the Naturena Female prison in Johannesburg, South Africa, She will discuss her work with The Medea Project and the documentary on incarcerated women and theater she is writing and co-producing with her long-time collaborator, Idris Ackamoor, which is titled “From San Francisco to Soweto.”
Black, Anthony
Completion Date: 8/30/2011
Chair: Craig Werner
Thesis title: “Our Dark-Skinned Beloved Will Take Us In.” Triadic Patterns of Masculine Bonding in Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting and Leslie Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Agi’n, Huck Honey”
Essame, Jeanne
Completion Date: 8/26/2011
Chair: Gayle Plummer
Thesis title: Haiti, Everything You Want It To Be: The Creation of Cultural Authenticities (1940-1970)
Garris, Tiffany
Completion Date: 8/24/2011
Chair: Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis
Thesis title: Intersectionalaty and Feminist Visual Analysis: Decoding the Historical Representation of the Myth of the Black Matriarch in History, Visual Culture, and its Subliminal Image in the Character, Mrs. Huxtable, in The Cosby Show (1984)
Evanco, Kevin
Completion Date: 5/13/2011
Chair: Craig Werner
Thesis title: Children of Azusa: Alexandra Gee and the Spiritual Mantle of C.H. Mason and William J. Seymour
Afro-American Studies Graduate receives grant
Sharunda Owens, (B.A. ’08) was awarded a full tuition fellowship as the first ever Quarles & Brady Fellow at UW Law School. The firm will offer her professional development and mentorship as well.
Film: Off and Running: An American Coming of Age Story
Avery, an African American teenager and the adopted daughter of two Jewish lesbian moms in Brooklyn, goes on a journey to uncover her roots.
Thursday, March 31, 2011 ~ 6:00 P.M.
Psychology 107, Brogedn Psychology
Link: Off and Running
Contact: 265-8250, extra@wisc.edu
DR. SYLVESTER OGBECHIE: PUBLIC LECTURE AND WORKSHOP (MARCH 3-4, 2011)
Dr. Ogbechie is Associate Professor of Classical, Modern, and Contemporary and African Diaspora Arts; Visual Culture, and Knowledge Systems Theory, Department of Art and Architecture, University of California-Santa Barbara He is author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, 2008 (Winner of the Melville Herskovits Award, 2009); Founder and Director of Aachron Knowledge Systems-Aachron Editions and Critical Interventions, a Journal of African Art Theory and Criticism
Public Lecture: "Who Owns Africa's Art? Museums, Knowledge Work and the Economics of Cultural Patrimony"
Thursday, March 3, 2011, 5:00 p.m., Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140
Graduate Student Workshop: "The Curator as Culture Broker"
Friday, March 4, 2011, 10:00-12:00 noon, Chazen Museum of Art, Room L170
This visit is sponsored by the Center for Visual Cultures- funded by the University of Wisconsin Lectures Committee and the African Studies Program.
Lead organizer - Evjue-Bascom Professor Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, Department of Afro-American Studies and Gender & Women's Studies, Department of Art Affiliate; Co-sponsors - the African Studies Program, Department of Afro-American Studies (in celebration of its 40th Anniversary), Department of Art History, African Diaspora and Atlantic World Research Circle, Art Department, Visual Cultures Student Focus Group, African Students Association, and Art History GradForum. Also, presented in conjunction with Illuminate: Year of the Arts.
The Center for Visual Cultures Announcement/Details:
Lecture: " Who Owns Africa’s Art? Museums, Knowledge Work and the Economics of Cultural
Patrimony"
"This lecture evaluates how strategies of art collection and display enable the conversion of African cultural objects into discursive and fungible artworks. It analyzes how museums, art institutions, and the discourse of art history produce and organize information about African art, and investigates the politics of representation that affect the value of African art and cultural knowledge in the global economy. It also investigates the meaning of the canon of African art as it is represented in private collections and contemporary museum settings. Its objective is to interrogate how African art is incorporated into Western knowledge systems and structures of display by analyzing the relationship between African artworks in their contemporary locations (museums, private collections, the art historical construction of meanings), and the history of their origins as part of communities of objects, whose use in religious, ritual, economic and social contexts formed part of the
knowledge systems of particular African peoples. In this regard, the appropriation of African cultural objects for Western museums and collections participate in the active transfer of equity from African producers of these artworks to their Western collectors. I therefore examine the current rising demands by Africans and other formerly colonized peoples for repatriation of historically pedigreed artworks currently housed in Western collections. I suggest that the struggle for repatriation of these artworks is partly an effort to secure greater access to and share of the economic value of African cultura and how will they affect our understanding of African art currently located in Western museum?"
Graduate Workshop: "The Curator As Culture Broker"
"The seminar investigates the increasing disjunction between curatorial representations of contemporary African arts in which the work of contemporary artists based in the west is taken to stand in for Africa in contrast to the realities of production and representation of contemporary art on the African continent itself. The location of contemporary African art confronts a central problem of cultural practice in the era of globalization: what is the value of Africa as a site of globalization, as a place with its own history of development of specific visual languages and strategies of visual representation? Our premise is that the curatorial regime of prominent curators of contemporary African art, such as Okwui Enwezor and Simon Njami can be faulted for legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispenses with the continent itself as a historical theater of contemporary art and visual culture engagements. We will investigate the emergent notion of the curator as “Culture Broker “ and the impact of their newfound prominence on the discourse of art history and cultural patrimony."
Reading Materials
1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Whose Culture Is It?” in James Cuno, ed. Whose Culture? The Promise of
Museums and the Debate over Antiquities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009: 71-86.
2. Andrew McClellan, “Cosmocharlatanism”. Oxford Art Journal, 32/1, 2009: 167-171.
3. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker: A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of
Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art”. Aachronym.
4. John Henry Merryman, ed. Imperialism, Art and Restitution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2006: 114-174
FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF
The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Afro-American Studies and the Campus Women's Center are proud to present Ntozake Shange's play, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO'VE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF.When this award-winning play was produced on Broadway in 1975, it marked only the second time a play by an African American woman was produced on the Great White Way.
The play will be performed at 7:00 pm on Saturday, December 11, and Sunday, December 12 in the H'Doubler performance space in Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue. This event is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
For more information call or e-mail Sandra Adell, Professor, Department of Afro-American Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison, 608.334.0147 (saadell@wisc.edu)
This exhibition is presented by the Department of Afro-American Studies in commemoration of its 40th anniversary and as a celebration of the 2010-11 Year of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Unbound is an exhibition of African-American artists' books and children's books selected from the Kohler Art Library collection. The artists' books are organized into four categories: Ancestry, Biography, Memory/Trauma, and Resistance--to situate the voices of the artists in imagined locations from which they address the reader. The children's books, similarly, capture memory and imagination, overlapping and expanding these fluid themes on aspects of life. Though the books vary in texts, images, processes, shapes, materials, aesthetics, and modes of communiation, they represent the agency of the artist in a metaphorical practice of becoming unbound.
Exhibit opening reception: November 5, 5:30-7:30pm.
Additional talks at the Kohler Art Library:
Graduate student, Doria Johnson (Dept. of History), Nov. 10, 4-5pm
Book artist, Pleschette Robinson, Racine, WI, Nov. 17, 4-5pm
Children's Book Artist/Animator, Odalo (Wasikworks Studios), Madison, WI, Dec. 6, 4-5pm
Graduate student, Janine Sytsma (Dept. of Art History), Dec. 15, 4-5pm
Curated by Ph.D. students Doria Johnson and Janine Sytsma, based on a project initiated in the seminar "Beyond Primitivism: African and African-American Art in Museums," (Fall 2010), under the auspices of Professor Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis.
Art Flowers Command Performance
Art Flowers, Vietnam Vet, Novelist, Poet and Professor of English, Syracuse University is giving a volunteer, command performance in Henel C. White Hall, SLIS Commons (Room 4207) Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 4:30 p.m. This performance is in conjunction with the 3 day symposium: ...Next stop is Vietnam: the War on Record, 1961 - 2008.
…Next Stop Is Vietnam: The War on Record, 1961–2008
3–Day Symposium — November 18–20, 2010
In summer 2010, Bear Family Records released “…Next Stop Is Vietnam: The War on Record, 1961–2008,” a 13 disc, 300+ song collection of music about the Vietnam War. Including songs from all genres and political viewpoints, this set is the definitive audio document of the Vietnam War. A review by ccmusic.com calls it, “An entire college course masquerading as a boxed set…that look[s] at the Vietnam conflict’s impact on American society.”
In honor of this landmark achievement, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and other community partners will host a 3–day symposium November 18–20 to focus on the critical role that music played during the Vietnam era. All of the events are FREE and open to the public.
Presented in partnership by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Integrated Liberal Studies Program, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Wisconsin Public Television, and the Monona Terrace and Convention Center. This event is part of the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Annie Crangle, (B.A. ’10) was awarded Teach for America Post. Starting this fall, Annie will teach in Twin Cities, bringing new energy and leadership to the challenge of closing the academic achievement gap for students in low-income communities. In a year where admission was more competitive than ever before, with an acceptance rate of 12 percent, Annie was selected from a record 46,000 individuals who applied to Teach For America and will join nearly 4,500 new corps members teaching in 39 regions across the country.
Charles Hughes, (M.A. ’03) was awarded CIC/Smithsonian Institution Fellowship. Fellowships are offered by the Smithsonian Institution to provide opportunities for graduate students, predoctoral students, and postdoctoral and senior investigators to conduct research in association with members of the Smithsonian professional research staff, and to utilize the resources of the Institution. These fellowships are offered through the Smithsonian's Office of Fellowships, Under this fellowship program, the Smithsonian Institution and the Fellow’s university share the cost of support
Katherine Mellen Charron, (M.A. ’97) Ph. D. in U.S. History, Yale University, 2005 Freedom’s teacher : the life of Septima Clark (UNC Press, 2009) just won the Julia Cherry Spruill Award for best book in Southern women's history from the Southern Association of Women Historians.
Brenna Greer, (M.A. ’04)and Holly Y. McGee (M.A.’04) have won the prestigious Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. Brenna and Holly are the first UW students to receive the fellowship and collectively, they received two of the three awards! Congratulations!
"The Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Year Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, established in 1999, honors the life and academic achievements of one of the University's most distinguished and beloved professors, Dr. Erskine A. Peters (1948-1998). Dr. Peters taught English at the University and also became legendary for his commitment to scholarship, community service, and graduate education in the College of Arts and Letters.
William Sturkey, (M.A. ’07) winner of the 2010 Danky Fellowship competition, is a PhD candidate in History at Ohio State University where he studies modern African American History with a focus on the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. William’s research concentrates on the famous 1964 Freedom Summer campaign. His project, tentatively titled, “Just Give Us a Light,” is an extension of his Master’s thesis, which won the 2008 Glover Moore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society. This dissertation will examine the Freedom Schools that were designed to supplement the inferior education previously available to black Mississippi youths.
Department of Afro-American Studies
4141 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608-263-1642; Fax: 608-263-7198
