In this ground-breaking work on cultural representations, Duncan M. Yoon (Gallatin) examines the controversial symbol of China in African literature. He reads acclaimed authors like Kofi Awoonor, Henri Lopes, and Bessie Head, as well as contemporary writers, including Ufrieda Ho, Kwei Quartey, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Each chapter focuses on a genre such as poetry, popular fiction, memoir, and the novel, drawing out themes like resource extraction, diaspora, gender, and race. Yoon demonstrates how African creative voices grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in an increasingly multipolar world.

Date: October 2, 2023

Time: 5:30-7:00pm

Where: 19 Washington Square North

Who: NYU Abu Dhabi Institute in New York 

We’re thrilled to announce that our second annual gala, Street Heroes, will take place on Wednesday, October 4th at MoMA PS1.

This year, we’ll be ‘Celebrating NYC’s Smallest Businesses,’ the incredible vendors who bring our city streets to life. Join us for a night of delicious street food prepared by our member vendors, drinks, and dancing!

Your support allows the Street Vendor Project to sustain and grow our organizing, advocacy, and legal work on behalf of the street vendor community. Please register below to secure your tickets or sponsorship today!

Date: October 4, 2023

Time: 6:00-10:00pm

Where: MoMA PS1

Who: Street Vendor Project & Urban Justice Center

Nathan Thrall and the main subject of his upcoming book, Abed Salama, who is traveling from Palestine for the book tour, will be in conversation with journalist and author Amy Goodman. The event is sponsored by the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Adalah Justice Project. 

Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan, October 3, 2023). 

Summary taken from Barnes & Noble: "Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge."

Date: October 5, 2023

Time: 5:30pm

Where: 20 Cooper Square

Who: Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

In FRONTERA, choreographer Dana Gingras explores spaces of inclusion and exclusion, tackling borders as boundaries between the public and private realms. Animals of Distinction’s nine dancers — their bodies mapped in high resolution, their destinies unresolved — contend with the ideas of ‘a real or imaginary dividing line’ and the extreme limits of understanding.

United Visual Artists (UVA) creates a spectacular world of light. Paired with Fly Pan Am’s live, gripping, post-rock beats and field recordings by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Dave Bryant, they form a dynamic, visual conversation between choreography, architecture, and sound.

In an era of accelerated climate change, mass migration and corporate surveillance, the human body has never been rendered so visible, subject to increasingly invasive forms of oversight and processing. Increasingly, the border moves with the body, and seeks to organize and orchestrate its passage through the world. In the ever-advancing frontier of technology, what space remains for the unruly, ungovernable body?

Date: October 12 and 13, 2023

Time: 7:30pm

Where: The Red Theater

Who: The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi

War and militarism, the global right turn and nationalist populism, racial capitalism in crisis, environmental degradation, and the heightened persecution of people due to sexual orientation and gender identification, have all been leading causes of the contemporary crisis of global displacement. With over 70 million displaced peoples worldwide, and another 40,000 fatalities among refugees seeking asylum in “fortress Europe,” this one day symposium brings together artists and scholars who situate migrant justice struggles within a queer/feminist frame. Collectively they foreground the voices of those directly impacted by carceral systems of policing, surveillance, and detention. From the SWANA diaspora to the US-Mexico border to Puerto Rico, they illuminate the ways in which these migrant communities engage in myriad movements for social justice and imagine worlds beyond sexual, gender, national, and racial borders and boundaries.

Panel 1: Voices from the Camps: Citizenship, Diasporas, Social Movements│3:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Panel 2: Dissonant Sounds, Disruptive Images: Queer/Trans/Feminist Aesthetics │4:30 pm to 6:00 pm

Performances by Vena Cava and Warhola Pop│6:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Date: October 13, 2023

Time: 3:00-7:00pm

Where: 20 Cooper Square, Room 101

Who: NYU’s Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective

Please join us to celebrate the 25th anniversary edition of Kevin Kenny’s acclaimed work of history, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.

Twenty Irishmen were hanged in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the late 1870s, convicted of a series of sixteen killings allegedly committed under the cover of a secret society called the Molly Maguires. Hostile contemporaries described the Molly Maguires as inherently savage Irish immigrants who imported a violent conspiratorial organization that had no place in industrial America. Challenges to this nativist myth produced a counter-myth transposing the category of evil from the immigrants to their exploiters, casting the Irish as innocent victims of economic, religious, or ethnic oppression. Neither interpretation makes historical sense. The Molly Maguires were not depraved killers, but neither were they figments of the nativist or anti-labor imagination. They never existed as the conspiracy imagined by their enemies, but they did use violence to combat exploitation. Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it? Why did contemporaries describe them in such luridly hostile ways? And what do their actions tell us about the history of American immigration and transatlantic class conflict?

Kevin Kenny, Glucksman Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House, will address these and other questions in a public lecture followed by discussion and a book signing.

Date: October 19, 2023

Time: 7:00-9:00pm

Where: 1 Washington Mews

Who: Glucksman Ireland House

Register to attend this book launch.

Fear of a Black Republic chronicles how Haiti’s triumphant ascendance created a beacon of hope for free and enslaved Black people throughout the African diaspora, especially those fighting for freedom in the United States. Cognizant of Haiti’s centrality to the global struggle for Black liberation, free and enslaved Black people in the U.S. waged an unyielding battle throughout the early nineteenth century to defend Haiti and its sovereignty. In so doing, they gave birth to a new Black internationalist consciousness—one that not only demanded an end to slavery, but also insisted on full freedom, equality, and sovereignty for Black people throughout the African diaspora.

Dr. Leslie Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and is a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, and Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States. She is also the co-editor of three additional volumes, including Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining the Boundaries of Black Intellectual History. Her current research, which appears in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, examines how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for modern-day policing. A three-time Ford Foundation fellowship recipient, Alexander is the immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and serves on the Advisory Councils for the National Council for Black Studies, the Journal of African American History, Black Perspectives, The Black Scholar, and the Montpelier Foundation Board.

Date: October 25, 2023

Time: 5:00-6:30pm

Where: Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center of Arts & Science

Who: Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora

Professor Cecilia Márquez discusses her upcoming book, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (University of North Carolina Press).

In the 1940s South, it seemed that non-Black Latino people were on the road to whiteness. In fact, in many places throughout the region governed by Jim Crow, they were able to attend white schools, live in white neighborhoods, and marry white southerners. However, by the early 2000s, Latino people in the South were routinely cast as "illegal aliens" and targeted by some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation in the country. This book helps explain how race evolved so dramatically for this population over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

Márquez guides readers through time and place from Washington, DC, to the deep South, tracing how non-Black Latino people moved through the region's evolving racial landscape. In considering Latino presence in the South's schools, its workplaces, its tourist destinations, and more, Marquez tells a challenging story of race-making that defies easy narratives of progressive change and promises to reshape the broader American histories of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, immigration, work, and culture.

Date: October 26, 2023

Time: 5:00-6:30pm

Where: 20 Cooper Square, Fourth Floor

Who: The Latinx Project and the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis