January 31st
Smoldering Embers: Negative Peace, Memory of Home, and Environmental Conflict in Mt. Elgon
Location: Goodman South Library, 2222 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Dr. Kevin Wamalwa
Anthropology and African Cultural Studies, UW-Madison
Talk Description
From 2005 to 2008, Mt. Elgon, Kenya, experienced the most brutal ethnic land-related conflict in its history, involving murders, disappearances, torture, and sexual assault. My ethnographic study of these violent events highlights the sociopolitical conditions that sustain instability in Mt. Elgon, the possibility of future conflicts, and how these continue to affect the lives of people in the region. I argue that despite the ongoing peacebuilding efforts, only a “negative peace” has prevailed in Mt. Elgon, where the dilemmas of (un)belonging, undressed injustices, and environmental and land crises still put the community on the brink of further conflict.
Speaker’s Bio
Kevin Wamalwa is an Anthropologist and African Cultural Studies scholar who studies resource-based conflict and post-violence memory in Kenya. His current work on embodied memories of violence explores situated understandings of victimhood and villainy in Mt. Elgon, Kenya. Kevin also holds an MA in African Languages and Literature from UW-Madison, focusing on Swahili utopian literature. His academic publications include “The Problem of (un)Belonging” (2021) and “Students’ Reparticularization of Chinese Language and Culture” (Co-othered with Amy Stambach, 2018). Kevin is also a published poet and story writer with works including Miale ya Ushairi (2015), a poetry study guide for high school and middle-level colleges; a short story, “Nimerudi Tena” (I have Returned) in Kunani Marekani? (What is there in America? 2015, Iribemwangi, ed.). As a believer in education for all, Kevin founded the Deserv-Ed initiative, which supports needy high school and college students in Kenya to complete their education. Kevin is the current African Studies Fellow teaching the new African and Global Black Studies Course at Madison College.
February 28th
The Unholy Trinity: Immigrating while Black and African
Location: The Atrium at the Village on Park, 2300 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Harry Kiiru
Department of African Cultural Studies, UW-Madison
Talk Description
African migration to the United States has grown significantly in the last several decades, bringing to the fore a number of interrelated socio-historical, cultural, and political processes. Although fairly small, in comparison to other migrant groups who have longer histories and trajectories in the U.S., this growth in African migration has seen a related increase in migrant literature, films, music, art, and other forms of cultural production. In considering this population growth and its corresponding cultural production realities, this talk will investigate two overlapping questions: What does it mean to migrate while Black, and while African in African migrant literature?
Speaker’s Bio
Harry Kiiru is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies with a minor in African American Studies. His dissertation titled The Culturally and Racially Body in Motion: How Sub-Saharan African Immigrants Become Black in the United States, is a study of the new African diaspora’s racialization processes of incorporation into the ethno-racial hierarchal order within the United States and how they negotiate this identity. The study begins with the 1959-63 East African Students’ Airlift which saw almost eight hundred students attend schools in the U.S. and Canada. The Airlift as a concrete historical moment allows me to construct a periodization that runs from the 1950s to the present. Methodologically, he employs a mixed-method approach, incorporating archival research, African migrant literature and filmic analysis, and self-ethnography.
April 24th
Nigerian Women’s Rhetoric of Sexual Pleasure and Power Online
Location: The Atrium at the Village on Park, 2300 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Oluwayinka Arawomo
Department of English, UW-Madison
Talk Description
How do Nigerian women make sense of sex when silence is a cultural and discursive norm? How is the digital media both an alternative and ambivalent space for these women to disrupt silence and critically engage dominant sexual discourses? This talk addresses these salient questions through examining Nigerian women’s sexual discourses online and how their rhetorical practice of dialoguing not only enables knowledge and meaning making, but also articulates the possibilities and experiences of sexual pleasure and power for Nigerian women even in restrictive contexts.
Speaker’s Bio
Oluwayinka Arawomo is currently a 6th year PhD candidate in the Department of English (Composition and Rhetoric program) at UW-Madison. She is the Vice President of the Oline Writing Centers Association (OWCA). She is the past TA Assistant Director of UW-Madison’s Writing Center. Her research interests include digital writing and rhetoric, Nigerian women’s discourses in digital spaces, and African feminism. Her current research project investigates digital media as alternative and ambivalent spaces for Nigerian women’s rhetoric of sexual pleasure and power. She has taught first year composition for four years and supported her students in the writing classroom and one-to-one tutoring in the Writing Center.