“Africa, Empire, Congo: A Conversation with Adam Hochschild”

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight (1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. Hochschild’s books have been translated into five languages and have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, and the Society of American Travel Writers. Three of his books - including King Leopold’s Ghost - have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. King Leopold’s Ghost was also awarded the 1998 California Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction. Hochschild has also written for the New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones (which he co-founded), The Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. A former commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” he teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. This event is co-sponsored with Center for the Humanities.

“Reading Africa: A Conversation with Karen-King Aribisala”

Karen King-Aribisala, award-winning Caribbean and African novelist and short-story writer, reads from her work and shares her diasporic experiences with us.

Karen King-Aribisala, originally from Guyana and now based in Nigeria, is internationally known as an accomplished and award-winning novelist and short story writer. In addition to over a dozen short stories published in reputable magazines such as Black Orpheus, BIM, Wasafiri and Kunapipi; and major anthologies such as Five Nigerian Writers published by the Association of Nigerian Authors, and Into the Nineties: Postcolonial Women’s Writing edited by Anna Rutherford, King-Aribisala has also published the acclaimed collection, Our Wife and Other Stories (1990; expanded and reprinted in 2004 by Laurier Books [Ottawa, Canada]), and the very popular Kicking Tongues, published by Heinemann under its globally famous imprint of African Writers Series in 1998. The novel is an extremely imaginative humorous reworking of the medieval English Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, set in contemporary Nigeria. King-Aribisala continues to be amply recognized for these achievements. Our Wife and Other Stories won the Regional Prize (Africa) for Best First Book in Commonwealth Literature (Toronto, Canada, November 1991). For travel, creative writing and research, King-Aribisala has won grants from the Ford Foundation, British Council, Goethe Institute, and the James Michener foundation in creative writing, and more. She has also had successful reading engagements across continents. She was in Malta for a week in March 2005, and at the African Literature Association conference in Boulder in April 2005. Karen King-Aribisala is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lagos in Nigeria where she teaches Caribbean and African literatures.

March 30, 2005 | 2:00 - 4:00 pm | 206 Ingraham

February 23, 2005 | 2:00 - 4:00 pm | 206 Ingraham

February 2, 2005 | 2:00 - 4:00 pm | 206 Ingraham

Stanlie James, “Human Rights: Black Feminist Theorizing Activism--A Conversation with Stanlie James”

December 6, 2004; 4:00 pm; 6191 Helen C. White Hall

Co-Sponsored by the African Diaspora and Atlantic World Research Circle.

Monica Miller, an assistant professor of English at Barnard College, works in the field of African-American and African diasporic literature and cultural studies. Her current book project is “Slaves to Fashion: Dandyism in the Black Atlantic Diaspora,” a cultural history of the black dandy from its origins in 18th-century England to the present. This study takes a trans-Atlantic focus and traces the movement of the figure from the forced foppery of black slaves in England to America in the colonial period, through its flowering in American blackface minstrel theater, to its subsequent vogue in late 19th and early 20th-century African American and American literature, culminating in its late 20th-century currency as an emblematic figure of black cosmopolitanism. Miller's essay on "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man," published in Calaloo last year, is taken from this project. Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on American Stud ies, Miller is the recipient of awards from the Mellon, Ford, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations.

Symposium - “1804 in 2004: Legacies of the Haitian Revolution” - For a complete schedule of Symposium events (and abstracts of papers presented), click above.

Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian. Co-Sponsors: Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies; African Diaspora and the Atlantic World Research Circle; The Center for International French Studies; and The Professional French Master’s Program. For further information contact Deborah Jenson at djenson@wisc.edu.

October 15, 2004; 1:00 - 2:00 pm; 340 Ingraham Hall

Interactive discussion - “Theorizing Diaspora: Locations and Subject Positions,” by R. Radhakrishnan, University of California-Irvine.

Co-sponsored with the Program in Asian American Studies. Light refreshments will be provided.

R. Radhakrishnan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location, Theory in an Uneven World, Theorizing the Diaspora: Pedagogies of Immanence, and When is the Political? (forthcoming).

Workshop - “Diasporas: Theories and Practices” - Selected readings from Global Diasporas by Robin Cohen and The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Edwards.

Workshop - “Weapons of the Weak: Resistance and Displacement in Black Cultural Politics” by Michael Hanchard, Northwestern University.

Performance - Requiem by Kwame Dawes, University of South Carolina, and John Carpenter.

Workshop - “Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Popular Political Music, African and African American Relations” by Tejumola Olaniyan.

Workshop - “African America and Africa: Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs” (both text and performance).

Workshop reading selections, primarily on definitions and conceptions:

• Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse.” Diaspora 10:2 (Fall 2002): 189-219.
• James Clifford, “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302-38.

African Diaspora Studies at UW-Madison. Faculty panel discussion facilitated by Professor Teju Olaniyan, African Languages and Literature, English; Chair, African Diaspora Studies Committee, UW-Madison.