Our third talk for the Winter Quarter features Dr. Orly Clergé, Associate Professor of Sociology. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food!
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
Bio: Dr. Orly Clergé is an author and sociologist whose research focuses on race, migration, cities, inequality, and identity. Orly's first book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia(University of California Press, 2019; winner of the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the ASA Culture Section, and SSSP C. Wright Mills Book Award finalist) is a comprehensive exploration of the making of Black diasporic suburbs. The New Noir examines how nationality and citizenship are negotiated by the Black middle class and is the first book in a series on the politics of Black identity in the 21st century. Orly is currently crafting a book on the political identities of Black millennials during the Obama and Trump era. Tentatively titled Young World, this book is an intersectional analysis of how Black youth growing up in middle-class neighborhoods construct and challenge ideas about opportunity, political solidarity, and racial progress.
Orly also co-edited Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty of Color Survive & Thrive in the Academy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) which uncovers the daily encounters underrepresented faculty at historically White college and universities have with racial exclusion and their strategies of resistance. This volume is a collection of letters from dynamic faculty of color across the country who dare to make public their private racialized interactions with other faculty, administrators, students, and staff. These letters are paired with mentor letters from senior faculty who offer tools for creating racial equity in higher education. Orly's other writings have appeared in Ethnic & Racial Studies, The New Black Sociologist, Sociology Compass, and Population, Space, and Place.
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!
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.
12:00pm-1:30pm
Hart Hall 3201
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.
