Our first talk for the Spring Quarter features, Adeola Oni-Orisan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UC Davis. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food! *Lunch is provided.
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
Title: "Abortion Discourse in Practice: Lagos state and the effort to implement safer abortion in Nigeria"
Abstract: Abortion discourse—how abortion is represented in and through society, what is said and can be said about it—does not reflect the empirical realities of its practice in Nigeria. Despite widespread prevalence in the private sphere, abortion remains a “public secret” and its legality a subject of intense debate, stigma, and misinformation. That Nigeria has the highest number of annual pregnancy-related deaths in the world, ten percent of which can be attributed to a lack of access to safe abortion, charges the silences around abortion with particular urgency. In this talk, I examine debates surrounding the launch, and subsequent indefinite suspension nine days later, of the Lagos State Guidelines on Safe Termination of Pregnancy for Legal Indications in order to unpack the discursive pathways through which personal, sociocultural, and regulatory structures shape the provision of abortion in Nigeria. Anti-abortion opinion pieces leveraging the Dobbs decision while simultaneously preaching the importance of protecting African morality from Western infiltration use the language of anticolonial resistance while concealing legacies of colonialism. I argue that abortion and the stories Nigerians tell through it reveal the role reproduction plays in the nationalist construction and maintenance of a distinct African cultural imaginary.
Bio: Adeola Oni-Orisan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UC Davis. Jointly trained as a family physician and medical anthropologist, her research engages medical anthropology, critical race theory, Black feminist studies, and science and technology studies to examine how ideas about Blackness, gender, religion, and reproductive health are reinforced, deployed and resisted in struggles for health and well-being. Clinically, she provides comprehensive primary, prenatal, and obstetric care, with a focus on historically marginalized populations. Dr. Oni-Orisan earned her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the joint program at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley and her MD from Harvard Medical School. She is co-founding director of the Center for Health Action and Social Medicine at UC Davis, and also co-director of The Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health and Healing.
Our second talk for the Spring Quarter features, Charlie Hankin, an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Davis. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food! *Lunch is provided.
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
Title: The Secret Literary History of an Afro-Cuban Rhythm
Abstract: During the 1920s, Victor Talking Machine Company created a “Latin” music market with recordings of Afro-Cuban dance genres such as son and rumba. This music introduced foreign ears to a distinctive rhythmic framework, a repeated asymmetric oscillation between three and two pulses known as the clave. With origins in West African timelines, the clave soon entered jazz, became the basis for salsa, and “conquered the world.” Parallel to the clave’s musical prominence runs a relatively hidden and understudied literary history, a clave poetics. In my current book project, Writing in Clave, I argue that the clave, beyond its musical function, served as a structural and poetic principle that shaped transnational literary and musical expressions of Caribbean identity from the 1920s to the 1960s. This talk concerns the way poets and performers associated with negrismo, an avant-garde literary movement in the Hispanophone Caribbean during the 1930s, experimented with clave. The hemispheric popularity of negrismo came in large part thanks to musical settings and poetry recitals by declaimers like Eusebia Cosme. By examining written verse, musicalization, and declamation within a clave framework, I explore how rhythm is imbricated with debates concerning gender, race, and nation.
Bio: Charlie Hankin, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese, specializes in music-literature relations in the twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean and Brazil. His research and teaching bring together sound studies, music, Afro-Latin American thought, hip hop poetics, and comparative literature. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and recording collaboration in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, his book Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas (UVA Press, 2023) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association. He is also editor of the dossier Words and Rhythm, Sound and Text (Latin American Literary Review, 2024). His current book project, “Writing in Clave,” proposes a rhythmic counterpoint between popular music and literature in the twentieth-century Caribbean. Charlie received his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese (Princeton U) and Master of Music in violin performance (U Oregon).
Our third talk for the Spring Quarter features, Brian Kwoba, an Associate Professor of History and Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Memphis Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food! *Lunch is provided.
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
Title: Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism
Description: This talk explores the political life of the journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. Harrison blazed a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America. He then emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. Most spectacularly, Harrison's Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of African people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison's revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory. Until now.
Bio: Dr. Brian Kwoba is an associate professor of history and Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Memphis. Over the past two decades, Dr. Kwoba has been an activist on issues including anti-imperialism, immigrant workers rights, climate justice, Falastin, and the movement for Black lives. In his spare time, he is a big time music lover (especially live jazz), an Afrobeats DJ, and a frequent traveler to Kenya where he visits his dad's side of the family. His new book, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, is an intellectual biography of one of history's most under-appreciated political visionaries.
