Our first talk for the Spring Quarter features, Dr. Gerald Bareebe, an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food! *Lunch is provided.
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
Title: "Social Structures and the Making of Museveni's Civil-Authoritarianism in Uganda"
Abstract: Why has President Yoweri Museveni's regime in Uganda endured for more than four decades? How did the NRA insurgency that seized power in 1986 evolve into one of Africa's most durable ruling regimes? And to what extent did it fundamentally transform the political order it inherited? Drawing on arguments developed in my recent book, I examine the resilience and longevity of the National Resistance Army (NRA) and its transformation into the governing National Resistance Movement (NRM). I challenge the prevailing assumption that the NRA's military victory in 1986 constituted a complete institutional rupture with Uganda's past. Instead, I argue that the NRM inherited and governed within a residual social landscape shaped by entrenched traditional monarchies, religious institutions, landed elites, and historic political parties that survived the country's civil wars. Confronted with these deeply rooted social forces, the regime adopted a hybrid governing strategy that fused coercion with co-optation, selective patronage, and strategic concessions. The result was a civil-authoritarian order in which political control is sustained through an interplay of repression, negotiation, and accommodation of powerful societal interests.
Bio: Gerald Bareebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University, Canada. His research and teaching focus on comparative politics of the Global South, civil wars, authoritarian regimes, and post-conflict governance. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto, as well as master’s degrees in International Relations from Makerere University and in Governance and Development from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His scholarship has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals including African Affairs, Civil Wars, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, and the Journal of Democracy, as well as in edited volumes on African and comparative politics. His most recent book, Social Structures and the Making of Museveni's Civil-Authoritarianism in Uganda (Palgrave Macmillan), examines the durability of Yoweri Museveni's regime, showing how residual social structures — monarchies, churches, landed elites, and legacy political parties — that survived decades of political upheaval have continued to constrain authoritarian consolidation and underpin the NRM's enduring hold on power.
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.
