Events

Professor Helg is an scholar of worldwide recognition in the field of Latin American History and Politics who has written extensively on issues of slave liberation movements and equal rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Her works focus on questions of social hierarchies based on race and color distinctions, and the participation process of Blacks and Mulattoes in post-independent politics and governance in Cuba, Columbia, Mexico, Argentina, and Haiti.  She also discusses issues of education and economic development in those regions in a comparative perspective. Themes such as identity, politics, social revolutions, nation building and reconstruction, and racial equality and nationalism are at the core of her scholarship.

Tsvey Brider Performance Group.
Presented by Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Wolf Humanities Center 

Performing as Tsvey Brider, Yiddish songwriting, arranging, and performing duo Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell (vocalist) and Dmitri Gaskin (accordionist) create new musical idioms by combining two distinct older ones: African American spirituals and the music of Jewish Eastern Europe. Drawing from folk songs, lullabies, art, and religious music, Children of the Ghetto + Black Shul mobilizes an array of historic genres to create a repertoire of songs authentically inhabiting the sounds and histories of two traditions.

Speaker SAMUEL REDMAN (UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST).

Join author, film historian, and Penn lecturer Donald Bogle for an interactive discussion of his newest book, Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers. Penn alumni and friends are invited to join the discussion live on-campus in Sweeten Alumni House or online. Professor Bogle is a lecturer in Penn’s Africana Studies Department and Cinema Studies program. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography and is one of the foremost authorities on African Americans in the movies. His latest book, Hollywood Black: The Star, The Films, The Filmmakers is a sweeping overview of Blacks in film from the silent era through Black Panther. This program, free and open to all Penn alumni and friends, is co-hosted by the Center for Africana Studies and co-sponsored by Penn Spectrum Programs and the Black Alumni Society. It may be attended in-person or online.

Registration required.

A talk by Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Cornell University.

Professor Fuhrmann, who consults with the Asian Film Festival Berlin in addition to her academic work, explores new work in Thai cinema in which queerness lies not only in the cross-gender, interspecies, supernatural, and geontological elements of the stories and films, but also in the affective and aesthetic approaches that characterize this cinema. In what ways does this cinema draw on Buddhism to present political critique and represent queerness in innovative ways?

A talk by Professor Joseph Hill, Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology.

The same U.S. educational, political, and cultural landscapes that led to the formation of Black American Sign Language also correspond to historical and lunguistic changes in Black ASL.  Professor Hill considers the history of Black ASL and its future directions.

This lecture, based on the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review Supreme Court 2018 Term issue, makes the case for reinvigorating abolition constitutionalism by attending to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. Today’s abolitionists trace the prison industrial complex back to slavery and view their movement as a continuation of the anti-slavery struggle, which animated the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. But should prison abolitionists engage with the U.S. Constitution as an abolitionist document? Professor Roberts will argue that, despite the ascendance of pro-slavery and anti-abolition constitutionalism, scholars and activists should consider the abolitionist history of the Reconstruction Amendments as a usable past to help move toward a radical future. Abolitionists can deploy the Reconstruction Amendments instrumentally to further their aims and, in the process, imagine a new abolition - or freedom - constitutionalism on the path to building a society without prisons.

YOLANDA ARROYO PIZARRO is an award-winning Afro lesbian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and feminist activist from Puerto Rico, who addresses both racial and gender issues, and sexual identity in her combative, non-conformist, and creative works. She offers lectures about antiracist, decolonial feminism, LGBTTQ issues and how to be a black woman in today’s society. She is also the Director of the Department of Afro-Puerto Rican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based in San Juan and has founded the Chair of Ancestral Black Women to respond to the invitation promulgated by UN and UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade of Afro-Descendants 2015−2024. Her book Las Negras, winner of the PEN Club Puerto Rico National Short Story Award in 2013, explores the limits of female characters during the slavery period that challenged hierarchies of power. She also won the Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2015 and 2012, and the National Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature in 2008. Her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, English, Portuguese and Hungarian.

Please join the University of Pennsylvania Black Law Students Association for our 32nd Annual Dr. Sadie T.M. Alexander Commemorative Conference, which celebrates the life of Dr. Alexander, the first Black woman to graduate from Penn Law in 1927.  This year’s Conference is entitled The Cost of Slavery: How Reparations Correct America’s Balance Sheet.

Please join Penn Law BLSA for the 32nd annual Sadie T.M. Alexander Commemorative Conference.