Winter '25: AAS Brown Bag Speaker Series | African American & African Studies

The speaker series features research talks from our own UC Davis AAS faculty and Designated Emphasis Affiliate Faculty across departments including Sociology, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, French and Comparative Literature, School of Education, History, and Community and Regional Development. *Lunch is provided.

Our first speaker event for Winter Quarter features Dr. Tobias Warner, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Program. Full details below. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food!

RSVP here or by emailing aas-support@ucdavis.edu

Friday, January 10th
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201

Dr. Tobias Warner, "The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman: The Global Lives of an African Story"

Abstract: This talk will explore the circulation of one of the most widespread yet understudied narratives in the world – a tale of desire, deception, and escape told all over the African continent and spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who refuses all suitors only to fall in love with a handsome stranger. But when that stranger turns out to be an evil creature in disguise who has assembled a human body for himself out of rented parts, the young woman must find a way to escape. Probably the best-known version of this tale is the story of the ‘complete gentleman’ recounted by Amos Tutuola in The Palm-Wine Drinkard but over the last two centuries hundreds of versions of this narrative have been collected, adapted, and reimagined across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds by creative writers, artists, and thinkers including Ama Ata Aidoo, Lydia Cabrera, Maryse Condé, David Diop, Melville and Frances Herskovits, Langston Hughes, Ahmadou Kourouma, Alan Lomax, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ Wa’Thiongo, Okot p’Bitek, and Efua Sutherland. This talk will examine some of the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged around this story.

Bio: Tobias Warner is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of Critical Theory at UC Davis. Warner’s first book explored the language question in literature from Senegal. The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal (Fordham) won first book awards from the African Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. Warner is at work on two new projects exploring the global circuits and uneven archives of African literatures. Since 2022, Warner has been working to translate and promote the forgotten early works of the Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ, author of the foundational feminist novel So Long a Letter. He is also completing a second book on the global circulation of Amos Tutuola’s “complete gentleman” story.

Our second talk will be by Dr. Traci Parker, Associate Professor of History. Full details below. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food!

Friday, February 7th
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201

Title: Targeting Black Love: The FBI's War on Intimacy and the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract: Beginning with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the FBI, through its COINTELPRO initiative, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Initially focused on alleged communist affiliations, the Bureau shifted its tactics to exploit King’s personal life, including his marital infidelity, to discredit him and undermine the movement. As the 1960s unfolded, the FBI’s fixation on King’s private life intensified, extending to other Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton. The Bureau scrutinized activists’ intimate lives, seeking compromising material and employing manipulative strategies such as embedding informants in activists’ social circles, orchestrating romantic relationships, and inciting personal conflicts. This talk explores how the FBI’s investigation into King’s marital and sexual life signaled a broader strategic shift: weaponizing attacks on Black love, intimacy, and marriage to destabilize the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. By targeting the personal bonds that sustained these movements, the FBI sought to erode their resilience, weaken their solidarity, and perpetuate systemic oppression.

Bio: Dr. Traci Parker is a historian and author specializing in African American history, civil rights, and social justice. An Associate Professor of History at the University of California Davis, she is the author of Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement(2019), a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, and co-editor of The New Civil Rights Movement Reader (2023). Her forthcoming book, Revolutionary Love, examines the role of romantic love in the mid-twentieth-century Black Freedom Movement. Dr. Parker has received numerous prestigious fellowships, including the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Our third talk for the Winter Quarter features Dr. Orly Clergé, Associate Professor of Sociology. Full details below. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food!

Friday, March 7th
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201

Title: Diaspora Wars: 21st Century Pan Africanisms

Bio: Orly Clerge is Associate Professor of Sociology. She is an urban ethnographer and the author of The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia (UC Press, 2019). Orly completed her Ph.D. In Sociology and Social Demography at Brown University.