Fall 2018 Newsletter

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

For those of us in academic life, the year really begins in September. The new semester promises the arrival of new students and colleagues, and the turn of the season marks the promise of change and new possibilities. For BCRW, the new year also comes with a number of milestones. After three exceptionally creative and productive years Professor Tina Campt has passed the directorship baton, and I am thrilled to step in as Interim Director for the year. This summer, we moved out of Barnard Hall–our home for forty years!–into our expanded offices in the newly opened Milstein Center. Amidst these changes, what remains consistent is our commitment to fostering collaborations between critical feminist scholarship and activism, one that is all the more urgent in our contemporary moment.

Our fall programming covers a wide array of intellectual, activist, and artistic projects. Here is just a sampling: “Global Radicalism,” a conference organized by our colleagues in Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies; two major events in the Critical Caribbean Feminisms series with writers Erna Brodber, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Roxane Gay, and Katia Ulysse, organized by Associate Director Tami Navarro; a literary salon featuring award-winning authors Zinzi Clemmons and Crystal Hana Kim, organized by Program and Media Manager Avi Cummings and colleagues in First Year Writing; and two important activist gatherings organized through the BCRW’s Social Justice Initiative—“Building Accountable Communities,” featuring 2018-2020 Fellow Mariame Kaba, and “Building from the Left,” featuring 2016-2018 Fellow Tarso Luis Ramos.And in advance of the November elections, we will screen Anne DeMare’s important new film, “Capturing the Flag,” documenting efforts by ordinary citizens to defend voting rights for all.

Meanwhile, we continue to digitize our priceless archive of feminist and social justice activist materials, thanks to the work of Community Archivist Che Gossett and our archivist colleagues in the Barnard Library; Creative Director Hope Dector boosts our signal and our influence by producing high-quality video of our events and critical discussions by activist leaders around the country; and Senior Program Assistant Pam Phillips continues developing critical cultural and organizing resources with housing activists in New York City.

We look forward to seeing you at our public events this semester, and we welcome you to visit our new office space. We will be hosting an Open House on Wednesday, September 12 from 2-4 PM—please come by to warm the new space and celebrate a new year!

Warmly,

Elizabeth Castelli

EVENTS

Conference
Global Radicalism: Solidarity, Internationalism, and Feminist Futures
The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY 10018
Saturday, September 22, 2018
10 AM – 5 PM

This one-day conference recovers the histories and possible futures of internationalist movements and anti-imperialist struggle. Conversations between scholar-activists and organizers will interrogate the histories of movements against racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and the intersections between them. Keynote speakers will include Mary Helen Washington, Distinguished University Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College.

Co-sponsored by Racial Capitalism Working Group, Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University

Image: Lydia Gibson, cover of The Liberator magazine (January 1920)

Critical Caribbean Feminisms: A Reading and Conversation with Nicole Dennis-Benn and Erna Brodber 
Event Oval, Diana Center
October 9, 2018
6:00 – 7:30 PM

BCRW and Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism host a reading and conversation between authors Erna Brodber (Nothing’s Mat and The Rainmaker’s Mistake, among others)  and Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun) in the newly expanded series, Critical Caribbean Feminisms. In this series, authors discuss issues related to Caribbean and its diaspora, method, feminism, and gender in their work. The conversation with be followed by a discussion moderated by Kaiama L. Glover, Associate Professor of French at Barnard College.

Co-sponsored by Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism

History, Memory, Craft: A Reading and Conversation with Zinzi Clemmons and Crystal Hana Kim
Event Oval, Diana Center
Monday, October 22
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

How do fictional narratives weaving through intimate and collective histories allow us to see our trappings and imagine futures where we are all more free? Join us for a reading and discussion with award-winning debut novelists Zinzi Clemmons author of What We Lose (2017), and Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me (2018), whose works explore the intimate legacies of political upheaval, race, migration, sexuality, motherhood, trauma and loss, and the malleability of memory.

Co-sponsored by First Year Writing and the Department of English at Barnard College, and Apogee Journal.

Building Accountable Communities
Kiyomi Fujikawa, Shannon Perez-Darby, and Mariame Kaba
Online Event: Visit bcrw.barnard.edu for details
Friday, October 26, 2018
4 PM

Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby will join us for a livestreamed discussion to explore models for building accountable communities for the purpose of healing and repair. What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing those who do harm? This conversation will be framed by audience questions and moderated by Mariame Kaba. This event will correspond with the release of four related videos with Kiyoma Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby. To watch the videos, join the conversation, and contribute questions, visit bcrw.barnard.edu.

Image: Kiyoma Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby

Documentary Screening: Capturing the Flag
Anne de Mare, filmmaker
Event Oval, Diana Center
Tuesday, October 30
6:30 – 8:00 PM

A tight-knit group of friends travel to Cumberland County, North Carolina – the 2016 “poster child” for voter suppression – intent on proving that small acts of individual people can make a difference. What they find at the polls serves as both a warning and a call to action for anyone interested in resisting racist repression and corporate control of elections, and protecting the “One Person, One Vote” principle of U.S. democracy. Exploring themes that are constantly sensationalized and manipulated by the media, “Capturing The Flag” offers deeply personal, often surprising perspectives on the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath.

Co-sponsored by The Athena Center, Barnard Student Life, and the Department of Political Science at Barnard College

Critical Caribbean Feminisms: Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016
November 8, 2018
6 PM – 7:30 PM

Roxane Gay, award-winning author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), Difficult Women (2017), and Bad Feminist (2014) and Katia D. Ulysse, Haitian poet, essayist and author of Drifting (2014), among other works, will join us for a reading and conversation in the Critical Caribbean Feminisms series. Following the reading, Gay, Ulysse, and BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro will discuss various forms of writing–including novels, memoir, and social media interventions–and examine how these create space for conversations around and advocacy for social justice.  

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center and Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.

Building from the Left: Strategies to Dismantle the Right
Featuring Cara Page, Tarso Luís Ramos, and Andrea J. Ritchie
Event Oval, Diana Center
November 13, 2018
6:30 – 8 PM

How can the left develop more robust strategies to undermine and disrupt the powerful ascendance of the U.S. Right, and build a transformative intersectional social justice agenda that encompasses reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, racial and immigrant justice, civil liberties, and economic justice? Cara Page (Activist-in-Residence 2016-2018), Tarso Luís Ramos (Executive Director of Political Research Associates and Activist-in-Residence 2016-2018), and Andrea J. Ritchie (Activist-in-Residence 2016-2020) will present research and strategies, pose ongoing critical questions, and facilitate a discussion with leading organizers and scholars in these fields. The conversation with be moderated by Janet Jakobsen. 

Co-sponsored by Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies at Barnard College

SAVE THE DATE: 44th Annual Scholar and Feminist Conference
February 8-10, 2019

CENTER HIGHLIGHTS

A New Cohort in the Social Justice Institute

We are thrilled to welcome the new cohort of the Social Justice Institute: Andrea J. Ritchie and Mariame Kaba, La Vaughn Belle, and CeCe McDonald. For more visit the Social Justice Institute.

In case you missed it, read up on the incredible work of our inaugural 2016-2018 Social Justice Institute cohort. Congratulations and deepest gratitude to activists and researchers Cara Page, Tarso Luís Ramos, Andrea J. Ritchie, Dean Spade, and Tourmaline.

Scholar and Feminist Conference: Save the Date  

The 44th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference will be held on February 8-10, 2019. For more visit our events.

SF Online 15.1: “Women and Community in Early Modern Europe: Approaches and Perspectives”

Edited by Laurie Postlewate, Christine McWebb, and Lori Walters, this issue explores how we can broaden our study and understanding of the roles and identities women forged for themselves within social collectives. The Scholar and Feminist Online is BCRW’s peer reviewed, open-source online journal. For more visit: sfonline.barnard.edu

Critical Inquiry Labs

Critical Inquiry Labs are interdisciplinary courses at Barnard College designed to foster in-depth critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship, making connections across real and imagined boundaries of theory and practice, historical eras, and geographic borders. These labs are a project of the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS) at Barnard College, which includes Africana Studies, American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. We are thrilled to share syllabi, readings, videos, faculty and student work from six CCIS Labs courses: Theorizing Activisms, Theorizing Diasporic Visuality, “Blackness” in French: From Harlem to Paris and Beyond, Hispaniola, African Women’s Rights and Resilience, and Gender, Empire, and Nationalism.

Featured newsletter image: “Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit,” a performance installation at the 43rd annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, February 2018, curated and written by Cara Page, directed and choreographed by Ebony Noelle Golden of Betty’s Daughters Arts Collaborative, with ensemble performers Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson, and Sara Abdullah.
http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaem.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaem.html