University of Chicago - Event CalendarEvent Calendar RSS FeedCopyright 2022, University of Chicagonsit-webserv@listhost.uchicago.edunsit-webserv@listhost.uchicago.eduhttps://feeds.uchicago.edu/what-is-rss.shtml720Mar 28, 2024: Celebrate the Living Legacy of Ida B. WellsIda B. Wells – one of the greatest civil rights leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After her newspaper in Memphis, Free Speech, was destroyed, Wells moved to Chicago, where she became a crusader against lynching and an advocate for women’s rights. The tradition of activism that she launched in Chicago continues to this day. Join us on March 28, as we celebrate Ida B. Wells’ legacy and commitment to free expression for all.   March 28, 2024 5pm – 8pm Logan Center, Performance Hall 915 E 60th St Chicago, IL 60637   Speakers and performers include the following and several others: Adam Green, Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History, and the College Aislinn Pulley, Executive Director of Chicago Torture Justice Center Anwuli Anigbo, Development Director at the Invisible Institute Dan Duster, Motivational Speaker and Ida B. Wells’ great-grandson Jamila Woods, poet Morgan Elise Johnson, Co-founder and Publisher at The TRiiBE  Natalie Moore, WBEZ journalist, author, and playwright Paula J. Giddings, Elizabeth A. Woodson Professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College This event is co-presented by The Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture, and The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, in partnership with WTTW. Reception included. Lead support for the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series comes from the Zell Family Foundation.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/230647-celebrate-the-living-legacy-of-ida-b-wells231764Mar 28, 2024 5:00 pm 8:00 pmLogan Center, Performance HallIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Mar 29, 2024: The Speculative Archive: Ja’Tovia Gary and Cauleen SmithPresented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Cauleen Smith and Ja’Tovia Gary in person, in conversation with Christopher Harris and Allyson Nadia Field. Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (Cauleen Smith, 1992, 7’, 16mm) In this short, shot on 16 mm film in 1992, Cauleen Smith employs her alter ego Kelly Gabron and a collage of images, text, and voices in order to fabricate a history in which the presence of Black women is reinserted into histories that often render them invisible. Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea (Cauleen Smith, 2016, 8’, digital) Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved, at the invitation of Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue, into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture. Three Songs About Liberation (Cauleen Smith, 2017, 10’, digital) Filmed in Chicago, Three Songs features three Black women performing historical monologues drawn from the 1973 book “Black Women in White America: A Documentary History,” edited by Gerda Lerner. The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019, 42’, digital) Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production. Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. This program features the full version of The Giverny Document (2019), filmed on location in Harlem and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production. Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist who roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, Smith constructs immersive installations, moving-image works, sculpted objects, and textiles engaging with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, and real and speculative utopias. This program includes three short films by Smith that span her practice: Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992), a densely layered collage of images, texts, and competing voices that combine to offer a meditation on mediation, identity, and self-representation. Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea (2016), a protest against what she calls “the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense” currently percolating in American culture. And Three Songs About Liberation (2017), filmed in Chicago as part of the exhibition “Revolution Every Day” (Smart Museum of Art, 2017-18). Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/231127-the-speculative-archive-jatovia-gary-and-cauleen231765Mar 29, 2024 7:00 pm 10:00 pmLogan Center, Screening RoomIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 2, 2024: Music and Social Movements in the Arab and South Asian ContextsEver wondered about the powerful bond between music and social change? Join us for an engaging discussion with Pranathi Diwakar, a Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at UChicago, and Ronnie Malley, a PhD Student in Music at UChicago and a talented multi-instrumentalist. Together, we’ll delve into the fascinating realm where music intersects with Arab and South Asian social movements. Explore the dynamic relationship between music and democracy, particularly in the context of Arab and South Asian democratic challenges. Discover how music has been a driving force behind social activism and political change in the regions. The discussion will also include a special demonstration of the oud, a historically significant instrument in Arab music, by Ronnie Malley himself.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232572-music-and-social-movements-in-the-arab-and-south-asia233014Apr 2, 2024 2:00 pm 3:30 pmRosenwald Hall, Room 011If you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 4, 2024: Literary Arts Lab: Opening Panel on Art & WonderWhat fills you with awe? What fills you with doubt? What bewilders, fascinates, or astonishes you about the enterprise of turning affective worlds into literary forms? As noun, as verb, as metaphysical state, what is wonder’s role in the creation of art? This panel, introduced by Robyn Schiff and moderated by Nick Twemlow, serves as the kick-off event for the Literary Arts Lab: Art & Wonder. Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo will discuss this spring’s festival theme.   Arda Collins is the author of Star Lake (The Song Cave, 2022), long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, and It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by Louise Glück. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Apart from her work as a writer and a teacher, she has also been an associate producer for the PBS documentary series Frontline and American Experience. She teaches at Smith College. Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity. For more information on Diaz, please visit www.prhspeakers.com. Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). My Lesbian Novel, a work of fiction and autobiography, is forthcoming in 2024. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England. In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s ten books of poetry include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlett Light, An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.   Literary Arts Lab: Art and Wonder is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Join us as we explore the intersections between art, wonder, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone. Presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstoreshttps://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/230982-literary-arts-lab-opening-panel-on-art-wonder231029Apr 4, 2024 2:00 pm Logan Center, Performance HallIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 4, 2024: Literary Arts Lab: Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading with Joy HarjoJoin us for a reading and conversation with 2024 Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poet Joy Harjo, moderated by Sarah Nooter. In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s ten books of poetry include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlett Light, An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.   Literary Arts Lab: Art and Wonder is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Join us as we explore the intersections between art, wonder, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone. Sponsored by the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading Series and presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstoreshttps://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/230984-literary-arts-lab-sherry-memorial-poetry-reading-with231030Apr 4, 2024 6:00 pm Logan Center, Performance HallIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 5, 2024: Literary Arts Lab: Art & Wonder with Renee GladmanJoin us for a reading and conversation with Renee Gladman, moderated by Korey Williams. Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). My Lesbian Novel, a work of fiction and autobiography, is forthcoming in 2024. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.   Literary Arts Lab: Art and Wonder is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Join us as we explore the intersections between art, wonder, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone. Presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstoreshttps://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/230989-literary-arts-lab-art-wonder-with-renee-gladman231032Apr 5, 2024 4:30 pm Logan Center, Performance PenthouseIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 5, 2024: Literary Arts Lab: Dedmon Writer-in-Residence Reading with Hernan DiazJoin us for a reading and conversation with 2024 Claire and Emmet Dedmon Writer-in-Residence Hernan Diaz, moderated by Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas. Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity. For more information on Diaz, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.   Literary Arts Lab: Art and Wonder is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Join us as we explore the intersections between art, wonder, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone. Sponsored by the Claire and Emmet Dedmon Writer-in-Residence Series and presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstoreshttps://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/230990-literary-arts-lab-dedmon-writer-in-residence-reading-231767Apr 5, 2024 6:00 pm Logan Center, Performance PenthouseIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 9, 2024: Rear View Mirror Session | Ashford & SimpsonCelebrated music historian and DJ, Duane Powell returns to dedicate the first installment of the 2024 Rear View Mirror Sessions to the iconic husband & wife duo Ashford & Simpson. Following this one-of-a-kind music lecture, the show will close with an inspired musical tribute by Keya Trammell and Erthe St, James. Reception begins at 6PM | Program beings at 6:30PM ParkingThere is free parking after 4pm in the lot on 60th and Drexel. Guests can enter on 60th. There is also free street parking on Midway Plaisance in front of the Logan.   This program is presented in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC), Soundrotation, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and BrainTrust Managementhttps://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232071-rear-view-mirror-session-ashford-simpson232607Apr 9, 2024 6:30 pm Logan Center for the ArtsIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 10, 2024: Race & Abolition Series Part II: Prison as a BorderPlease note that this event will be in-person only. The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) and Beyond Prisons Initiative present a two part discussion series in preparation for the CSRPC Annual Public Lecture on May 8, 2024 by Professor Gina Dent, Visualizing Abolition: How to imagine a World Without Prisons. Sessions are curated and facilitated by Brianna Suslovic, graduate student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, and Beyond Prisons Fellow. How is the prison a border? How do global forces shape the dynamics of incarceration and punishment in the United States? How can scholars ethically relate to prisons as sites that reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geography? This discussion uses Angela Davis’ & Gina Dent’s “Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment,” as a starting ground to address these questions. Dent and Davis discuss the history of studying prisons as well as the productive tensions between feminist and abolitionist paradigms for thinking and researching. Using the transcript of this conversation, we will discuss the global politics of incarceration, the role and limitations of scholarship in carceral settings, and the gendered forms of domination that emerge in carceral settings. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Lunch will be served!   SAVE THE DATE Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at (TIME TBA): CSRPC 2024 Annual Public Lecture featuring keynote Gina Dent on Visualizing Abolition: How to imagine a World Without Prisons. The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture Annual Public Lecture features distinguished public intellectuals whose work promotes engaged thought, scholarship and praxis around the topics of race and ethnicity within the public sphere. More details here.   Who is Gina Dent? Gina Dent is Ph.D. is a Humanities Associate Dean of DEI and Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, she serves as PI and Co-Director for the Mellon Foundation-funded Visualizing Abolition, a project designed to redirect social resources away from prisons by accessing the power of the arts. Her recent projects also grow out of her decades-long work as an advocate for prison abolition—Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Haymarket 2022), and the in-progress works Visualizing Abolition (co-edited with Rachel Nelson) and Prison as a Border, on popular culture and the conditions of knowledge. She is a member of the Scholars for Social Justice and the Portal Project, and works with several organizations nationally and internationally, primarily on justice-related concerns. Learn more   This series is presented by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and Beyond Prisons, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at UChicago.https://events.uchicago.edu/event/231373-race-abolition-series-part-ii-prison-as-a231373Apr 10, 2024 12:30 pm 1:45 pmCenters for Gender/Race Studies, Community Room (105)If you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 17, 2024: Beyond Prisons: A Conversation with Justice Practitioner Fellow Jimmy Soto and Professor Reuben Jonathan MillerJoin the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and our latest initiative, Beyond Prisons, for a conversation with newly appointed Justice Practitioner Fellow James “Jimmy” Soto. Learn more about Jimmy’s activism and his work as a legal advocate for incarcerated individuals while behind bars, and his amazing work on the outside since he won his freedom last December. Jimmy will be in conversation with Professor Reuben Miller, author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Wed, April 17, 5:30pm Doors open with a reception. 6pm Program begins. Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, Community Room 5733 S. University Ave. Food will be served.   Beyond Prisons is a teaching and learning initiative which interrogates, disrupts, and works toward moving beyond carceral logics and systems. The Justice Practitioner Fellowship is designed to advance practices, knowledge, and skills for fellowship recipients as well as broaden engagement for Beyond Prisons programming on campus and beyond. James “Jimmy” Soto: Exonerated after 42 long years of incarceration, Jimmy Soto is a human rights advocate and CSRPC’s 2024 Beyond Prisons Justice Practitioner Fellow. Jimmy hit the ground running when he walked out of prison just before Christmas in 2023. While incarcerated he earned his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program (NPEP) and was an active member of the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project’s (P+NAP) Think Tank which explores long-term sentencing practices in Illinois and nationally and is supported, in part, by CSRPC’s Beyond Prisons initiative. Jimmy is a paralegal with Northwestern Law School’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic and a research assistant with the Epistemic Reparations Global Working Group at Northwestern University. He is planning to go to law school next year. Reuben Jonathan Miller, PhD: Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity. Miller is also a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Miller’s first book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends in Chicago, Detroit, and a number of cities across the United States. He is currently conducting research on the “moral worlds” of people we’ve deemed violent and a comparative study of punishment and social welfare policy in port cities that were most involved in the transatlantic slave trade.https://events.uchicago.edu/event/232650-beyond-prisons-a-conversation-with-justice232650Apr 17, 2024 6:00 pm Centers for Gender/Race Studies, Community Room (105)If you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 23, 2024: Author Talk with Aaliyah BilalJoin us for a conversation with Aaliyah Bilal, author of Temple Folk. Bilal will be joined in conversation by Curtis J. Evans, Associate Professor of American Religions and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Faculty Co-Director of the Marty Center. Temple Folk was a Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction About the Book From Simon & Schuster – In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. In “Due North,” an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she’s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In “Who’s Down?” a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In “Candy for Hanif” a mother’s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In “Woman in Niqab,” a daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In “New Mexico,” a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human. About the Author Aaliyah Bilal was born and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She has degrees from Oberlin College and the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. She’s published stories and essays with The Michigan Quarterly Review and The Rumpus. Temple Folk is her first short story collection. About the Interlocutor Curtis Evans is Associate Professor of American Religions and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is an historian of American religions. His teaching interests are modern American religion, particularly since the Civil War, race and religion in US history, and slavery and Christianity. His first book, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), was an historical analysis of debates about the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and the origins of the scholarly category of “the black church.” His research emphases are interpretations and cultural images of African American religion, examinations of religion as a force for and obstacle to social and political reform, and the question of how social problems become defined and addressed as moral problems at particular historical moments. A partnership between the Martin Marty Center and the Seminary Co-Op, Hyde Park’s legendary academic bookstore, this author talk series features intimate conversations with authors of recent books that consider the topic of religion.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/225370-author-talk-with-aaliyah-bilal225375Apr 23, 2024 6:00 pm Seminary Co-op BookstoreIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 27, 2024: Walking the Middle Path: Using Hoodoo to Tell Your StoryIf your goal is to get over that writer’s block and finally tell your story–hoodoo can help! Participants will walk away with a basic understanding of how to read tarot, how to pull information from oracles, astrology, and herbs in relation to their creative writing project, and how to respectfully engage hoodoo practices when running into narrative blocks in their work. –BIO FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx writer, spoken word artist, and cultural strategist. A prolific creative and previously incarcerated artist, Hicks’ is known for their dynamic storytelling methods and compelling narrative arcs. Using poetry, prose, music, video, and live performances—they explore the evolution of personal and national identity, the cyclical nature of grief, the spiritual applications of quantum physics, decolonized eroticism/sensuality, and manifesting personal liberation. Hicks is an Artivist: someone who integrates transformative justice theory into their creative practice, using much of their work to advocate for the lives of marginalized people who make up our global majority. Their personal account of their time in pretrial incarceration in Hays County is featured in the ITVS Independent Lens 2019 documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail, and the Brave New Films 2021 documentary narrated by Mahershala Ali Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem.   Based in Chicago, IL, Hicks is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut poetry collection HoodWitch(Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Julie Suk Award, and the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize. They are currently working on their second collection, A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024) and a debut memoir about their carceral experience A Body of Wild Light(Haymarket Books, 2025). Both books are supported in part by grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards from the Art for Justice, Black Mountain Institute, Tin House, and The Right of Return USA. The former Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Hicks is a voting member of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs and its Songwriters and Composers Committee for the Texas Chapter. Hicks is also the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Tony-Award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, and Texas After Violence Project. Their poetry, essays, and digital art have been featured in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Slate, Split This Rock, Texas Observer, The Slowdown Podcast, and Yale Review, amongst others.   Born in Gardena, California, they were raised in Central Texas where they received their MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College’s Low Residency Program and founded their creative services LLC, Infinite. Creative. Lit.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232074-walking-the-middle-path-using-hoodoo-to-tell-your232608Apr 27, 2024 12:00 pm 12:50 pmGreen Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E. Garfield BlvdIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.Apr 27, 2024: Spirits, Spirituality, & CraftAs writers, celebrating culture through our work is as easy as sitting across the table from grandma. That ancestral influence is undeniable, but for some it is more intentional. It can be the circulatory process that streams through the work that is produced. Whether baptized in holy water or animal sacrifice - Christianity, Voodun, Santeria or Sanctified, these rituals imprint themselves in the work of the writer. The Spirits, Spirituality & Craft reading and panel discussion will bring together three writers whose work demonstrates how ancestral influence and spiritual practice manifests itself in their writing craft. We will discuss the intention behind this effort. Is it a memory purge? Or a necessary part of their work? How do they bring in or welcome these influences into their writing space? – Bios FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx writer, spoken word artist, and cultural strategist. A prolific creative and previously incarcerated artist, Hicks’ is known for their dynamic storytelling methods and compelling narrative arcs. Using poetry, prose, music, video, and live performances—they explore the evolution of personal and national identity, the cyclical nature of grief, the spiritual applications of quantum physics, decolonized eroticism/sensuality, and manifesting personal liberation. Hicks is an Artivist: someone who integrates transformative justice theory into their creative practice, using much of their work to advocate for the lives of marginalized people who make up our global majority. Their personal account of their time in pretrial incarceration in Hays County is featured in the ITVS Independent Lens 2019 documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail, and the Brave New Films 2021 documentary narrated by Mahershala Ali Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem. Based in Chicago, IL, Hicks is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut poetry collection HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019). TINA JENKINS BELL is a fiction writer, playwright, freelance journalist, literary activist, and academic. Bell is a three-time recipient of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events grant, an Illinois Arts Council grant and two fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation. She is a co-founder of FLOW (For the Love of Writing) and has collaborated with numerous writing organizations, authors, and bookstores to offer literary programming on Chicago’s south side. She has collaborated with Janice Tuck Lively and Sandra Jackson-Opoku to produce “A Conversation with Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks,” a fictitious account of the literary icons discussing race and women’s issues during a chance meeting in heaven. Her prose has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Hypertext Journal, ZYZZYVA Literary Magazine, and Us Against Alzheimer’s. KELI STEWART is a writer and educator whose writing has appeared in Quiddity, Meridians, Warpland, amongst other notable journals and publications. Keli was recently selected as a 2021-2022 School of the Art Institute Nichols Tower Artist-in-Residence, where she will facilitate community storytelling and creative writing workshops. She has received artist fellowships from Hedgebrook, where she was awarded the 2010 Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Award, and the Augusta Savage Gallery Arts International Residency Program. An alum of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Callaloo Summer Writing Workshops, Keli’s writing was selected first place in the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award from the Illinois Center of the Book, chosen by Illinois poet laureate Kevin Stein. A graduate of Providence St. Mel Highschool, she received her BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College in 2002, her MFA in Poetry from Chicago State University, and pursued doctoral work in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she studied with notable artists, activists, and scholars. Keli served as a Leadership Lab Fellow with the Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation. She is also the founder of Westside Arts House, selected as part of the Alliance of Artists Communities Emerging Program Institute. Her poetry collection, Small Altars was published with Bronzeville Books in 2021. ANDREA CHANGE (she/her) is a hometown girl, born and raised in Chicago. A graduate of Northwestern University with a Master’s degree from Roosevelt, she has been an active member of Chicago’s literary community for than 20 years. Her work has been published in the past in various journals and poetry anthologies from Tia Chucha Press, Powerlines and Stray Bullets. Her poetry was also included in the Steppenwolf Theatre production, Words on Fire. She is currently working on a book of memoir poetry and prose inspired by her experiences growing up on the city’s west side. Andrea is the executive director for the Guild Literary Complex and currently lives in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood with her two dogs Sasha and Missy.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232076-spirits-spirituality-craft232609Apr 27, 2024 1:00 pm 2:15 pmGreen Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E. Garfield BlvdIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.May 1, 2024: 2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture: TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Utopian Funk: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Failed Utopias and Black Arts”2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California “Utopian Funk: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Failed Utopias and Black Arts” Where is utopia in games? While games are now considered to be works of art, video games have also long been considered escapist fantasies—convenient distractions, even. If such accusations could possibly be true, where do we go when we escape in the art worlds of contemporary games? When we retreat to slay dragons and zombies, conquer as soldiers of war, best our friends in games of skill and strategy, do we ever find ourselves in the classically theorized worlds that comprise the “good no places” of utopia? This lecture embarks on an earnest—and urgent—search to locate utopia in games while taking a high concept detour through the Black arts traditions of funk music, Blaxploitation film, and speculative fiction. Put another way, what can Black arts teach us about games, play, and our ever-elusive visions of utopia? Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage as we explore digital dreams, sights, and soundscapes together. TreaAndrea M. Russworm (PhD, English, 2008) is the Microsoft Endowed Chair and a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; andTheorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/231784-2024-distinguished-alumni-lecture-treaandrea-m232610May 1, 2024 4:30 pm Centers for Gender/Race Studies, Community Room (105)If you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.May 3, 2024: The Speculative Archive: Deanna Bowen & Madeleine Hunt-EhrlichPresented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich & Deanna Bowen in person, in conversation with Christopher Harris and Allyson Nadia Field. Sum of the Parts: What Can be Named (Deanna Bowen, 2010, 19’, digital) Deanna Bowen’s 20 minute color video work sum of the parts: what can be named (2010), is a recorded oral performance that recounts the journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815, as told by Bowen herself. The Paul Good Papers (Deanna Bowen, 2012, 23’, digital) The Paul Good Papers was an interdisciplinary residency co-commissioned by Gallery 44 and the Images Festival of Independent Film, Video & New Media to commemorate Images’ 25th Anniversary. The project highlights the role of the Ku Klux Klan in opposing school integration and the beating of photojournalist Vernon Merritt III. Outfox the Grave (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2020, 5’, digital) A short film and a spell of protection. Too Bright to See (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, 25’, digital) Weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts. Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the concern of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations, and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Sum of the Parts: What Can be Named (2010) is a performed oral history recounting the “disremembered” journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815, as told by Bowen herself. The Paul Good Papers (2012) is a multimedia installation and performance project based on the filmmaker’s research into the third wave Ku Klux Klan and its connections to Canada. The video being screened originated as a looping video projection based on Good’s recording of school integration attempts in Notasulga, AL in February 1964. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who makes films concerned with the inner worlds of Black women. Valuing opacity and abstraction over linear narrative, Hunt-Ehrlich blends narrative and documentary elements to create surrealist interpretations of Black history and experiences—stories underrepresented in the Western film canon despite the continuous presence of Black filmmakers since cinema’s inception. Designed as an installation piece, Too Bright to See (2024) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this work brings attention to new aspects of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts. Preceded by Outfox the Grave (2020), described by Hunt-Ehrlich as “a short film and a spell of protection.”   Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/231763-the-speculative-archive-deanna-bowen-madeleine231766May 3, 2024 7:00 pm 10:00 pmLogan Center, Screening RoomIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.May 8, 2024: Annual Public Lecture: Gina DentJoin CSRPC for its signature event, the Annual Public Lecture, featuring distinguished public intellectuals whose work enhances our understanding of the centrality of racism and white supremacy in the systems we inhabit, and instigates action toward a more just campus, city, and world. This year we welcome scholar-activist, feminist, and writer, Professor Gina Dent, on the topic of “Visualizing Abolition: How to Imagine a World Without Prisons.” Dr. Dent is Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies; and Humanities Associate Dean of DEI at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the co-author of the book Abolition. Feminism. Now. along with Angela Y. Davis, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.   6:00-7:00 PM Reception  7:00-8:00 PM Lecture and Q&A International House, Assembly Hall 1414 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637https://events.uchicago.edu/event/232667-annual-public-lecture-gina-dent232667May 8, 2024 6:00 pm International House, Assembly HallIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.May 10, 2024: The Speculative Archive: Kevin Jerome Everson and Ephraim AsiliPresented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Kevin Jerome Everson and Ephraim Asili in conversation with Michael Gillespie, Christopher Harris, and Allyson Nadia Field. Emergency Needs (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2007, 7’, digital) In 1967, the respected lawyer Carl Stokes (1927-1996) became the first black mayor of a large American city, Cleveland, Ohio. On found-footage of press conferences, we see how he coped with the uprising that hit the city in July 1968. Something Else (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2007, 2’, digital) Something Else is a film about found footage as subject matter and Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia 1971 expressing her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia 1971 Pageant. The Citizens (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2009, 6’, digital) The film includes Mohammad Ali talking about life, Althea Gibson returning home as a champion, Fidel Castro playing baseball and three gentlemen being escorted into court all under the watchful eye of the media. A film made of found footage that shows how memory can be manufactured and therefore deconstructed. Sugarcoated Arsenic (Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, 2013, 21’, digital) The genesis of Sugarcoated Arsenic can be traced to Everson’s discovery of rare archival materials at the University of Virginia that revealed the institution’s deep though largely undocumented connection to the cultural and political revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Glenville (Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai, 2020, 2’, digital) Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai update the 1898 film SOMETHING GOOD – NEGRO KISS, which features the first representation of African American intimacy in cinema history. American Hunger (Ephraim Asili, 2013, 19’, digital) Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront America fantasies. Fluid Frontiers (Ephraim Asili, 2017, 23’, digital) Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists. All of the poems are read from original copies of Broadside Press publications by natives of the Detroit/Windsor region, and were shot without rehearsal. Kevin Jerome Everson was born and raised in the working-class community of Mansfield, Ohio. His expansive oeuvre attends to the lives of people living and working in similar American communities in the aftermath of the Great Migration to the present day. Some of Everson’s films are constructed from archival footage, uncovering forgotten details of African American life in the 1960s and 70s, such as the news coverage of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes’s response to the Glenville Uprising of 1968 in Emergency Needs (2007), a local media report on a Black pageant contestant in Something Else (2007), and media depiction of heroes and antiheroes in The Citizens (2009). Made with Everson’s long-term collaborator and colleague, Dr. Claudrena N. Harold, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) is a cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s. Glenville (2020), an homage to the recently rediscovered Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898), was made with another longtime collaborator, Kahlil Pedizisai, and reimagines the first known film depicting African American affection in the East Cleveland neighborhood of Glenville. Ephraim Asili is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates films, books, cassettes, records, collage, and installation works that cohere as a series of meditations on the everyday in relation to local and global politics. Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capital city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger (2013) explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories where American fantasies confront African realities and vice versa. Fluid Frontiers (2017) is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, which includes American Hunger,exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists. Shot without rehearsal, people native to the Detroit/Windsor region read poems from original copies of Broadside Press publications. Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232842-the-speculative-archive-kevin-jerome-everson-and232843May 10, 2024 7:00 pm 10:00 pmLogan Center, Screening RoomIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.May 17, 2024: The Speculative Archive: Ina Archer and Crystal Z CampbellPresented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Crystal Z Campell and Ina Archer in conversation with Jennifer DeClue, Christopher Harris, and Allyson Nadia Field. RW (Ina Archer, 2004, 2’) Using the dream/hallucination structure often associated with “film noir”, RW “gazes” at Archer’s mother’s favorite actor, Richard Widmark. Cab Calloway and Toshiro Mifune join in. Chlo-e:OK Ina! (Ina Archer, 2013, 4’) Dandied up in a rodeo-do stetson and chaps, Ina channels Oklahoma Bob Albright appropriating Spiritual singer, Jules Bledsoe, crooning Chl-oe! The Lincoln Film Conspiracy (Ina Archer, 2005-2021, 15’) The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is both a 30-minute film and a six-minute multi-screen installation that combines archival film footage, new video segments, and digital image manipulation. Archer recreates the sound and imagery of vintage sci-fi, and musical films to imagine an anthropologist’s discovery of vanished black movies that had previously been abducted by aliens. The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is set in the present, reflects on the past and imagines the future. The film humorously confronts the practice of film preservation and archiving, particularly of work by minority and regional artists. Go-rilla Means War (Crystal Z Campbell, 2017, 19’) Go-Rilla Means War, and its faded and discolored frames, are a metonym for Bedford-Stuyvesant’s deterioration by way of neglect, media demonization of Black bodies, and the War on Drugs, all of which formed a constellation leading to Bed-Stuy’s current gentrification. Viewfinder (Crystal Z Campbell, 2020, 18’) Viewfinder was shot entirely in the resort town of Varberg, Sweden and features recent migrants to Sweden. This immersive film installation takes cues from Swedish folktales, gestures, and movements to explore belonging, allyship, and living monuments. If our bodies are archives, what is the currency of place, of movement, of memory? Ina Archer is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer, and writer. An advocate for film preservation, she is a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the former co-chair of New York Women in Film & Television Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Her artwork and filmmaking examine the intersections of race/ethnicity, representation, and technology. Her practice explores the intersection of the archive, materiality, self-representation, performance, and speculative imaginings of Black pasts, futures, and alternative presents. The Lincoln Film Conspiracy, in its 3-channel form, reimagines the fate of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company films—race films made by one of the earliest Black film companies for Black audiences—and a fabulated subsidiary, “Archina Productions.” Preceded by two short films activating the archive of film history, RW (2004) and Chlo-e:OK Ina! (2013). Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps. Campbell’s creative practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and site-specific installations. Go-Rilla Means War (2017) is a filmic relic of gentrification. Featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, the film is a parable weaving intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure. Viewfinder (2020) was filmed entirely in a Swedish spa town and takes cues from political gestures and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments. Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.https://events.uchicago.edu/live/events/232844-the-speculative-archive-ina-archer-and-crystal-z232845May 17, 2024 7:00 pm 10:00 pmLogan Center, Screening RoomIf you have any questions about access or to request a reasonable accommodation that will facilitate your full participation in this event such as ASL interpreting, captioned videos, Braille or electronic text, food options for individuals with dietary restrictions, etc. please contact the event organizer.