Tag Archives: Black History

Posted on by

Black History Month Seminar Series: Dr Carmen Fracchia 4th November 2016

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND HUMANITIES

BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

BLACK-HISTORY MONTH SEMINAR SERIES*

Depicting the Emergence of the Afro-Hispanic Subject and the Formation of the Black Nation in early modern Spain Dr Carmen Fracchia, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultures and Languages

6.30pm-8.30pm on Friday 4 November 2016, in the Keynes Library (Room 114), Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square. London WC1H 0PD

The Afro-Hispanic proverb Black but Human will serve as a lens through which I explore the ways in which certain early modern visual representation of slavery both embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups and at the same time provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by African slaves and ex-slaves themselves in Habsburg Spain. My paper will argue that deep ethnic prejudices against black slaves and ex-slaves in the crowns of Castile and Aragón did not prevent the emergence of the ‘Afro-Hispanic subject’ in the visual form articulated by a range of artists from Spain, the Spanish territories in Europe, and New Spain (Mexico). I will focus on the extraordinary seventeenth-century case of the portrait of the slave Juan de Pareja by his celebrated slave owner, Diego Velázquez and the self-portrait of freedman Juan de Pareja in his paintingThe Calling of St Matthew. This paper will also explore the ways in which the Black but Human topos codifies the multilayered processes through which a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance and the ways in which it is articulated in Pareja’s 3-metre long masterpiece for the Habsburg court in Madrid (now in the basement of the Prado Museum).

*The Seminar is convened and chaired by Dr Mpalive Msiska (m.msiska@bbk.ac.uk), Reader in English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.

ALL WELCOME!

No booking required

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , ,
Posted on by

CORNER POLITICS: THE INTERSECTIONAL AND CROSS RACIAL SONIC VISIONS OF MILES DAVIS – 14 Oct 16

 

BLACK-HISTORY MONTH SEMINAR SERIES*

‘CORNER POLITICS: THE INTERSECTIONAL AND CROSS RACIAL SONIC VISIONS OF MILES DAVIS’

By Professor Elliott H. Powell, University of Minnesota.

6.30pm – 8.30 pm on Friday 14 October, 2016 in the Keynes Library (Room 114), Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square. London WC1H

In the summer of 1972, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis released On the Corner, his first jazz fusion studio album that deliberately sought to capture African American political consciousness of the early 1970s. Yet, the album heavily relied upon queer and South Asian cultural signifiers to articulate such political ideologies, two formations that generally sit outside dominant framings of Black political expressions during this period. This talk critically engages On the Corner, and argues that it linked and expressed South Asian sound and alternative sexualities as constitutive formations that animated and expanded notions of Blackness and Black life of the early 1970s.

 

Prof. Elliott Powell is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work brings together critical race, feminist, and queer theory to consider the political implications of Black popular culture. Writings from these research areas are published or forthcoming in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, and the “Black Queer and Trans Aesthetics” special issue of The Black Scholar (for which he is a co-editor). Additionally, he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Other Side of Things: African American and South Asian Collaborative Sounds in Black Popular Music, which examines African American and South Asian collaborative music-making practices in U.S.-based jazz, funk, and hip hop since the 1960s.

*The Seminar is convened and chaired by Dr Mpalive Msiska (m.msiska@bbk.ac.uk), Reader in English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.

ALL WELCOME!

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , ,