SCHEDULE!

Producing Race: Technology and the African Diaspora
October 28th, 2011
9am-7pm
Reception to Follow

 

9am-9:20 Breakfast
301 Philosophy Hall

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9:30-10am

Introductory Remarks
301 Philosophy Hall
Brent Edwards, Columbia University

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10:15-11:30am

Panel 1. The Body and Performance
301 Philosophy Hall
Joanna Dee Das, Columbia University
“Preserving Memory, Producing Diaspora: Katherine Dunham’s Multiple Archives”

Jasmine Johnson, University of California, Berkley
“Dancing Africa in Oakland: Race, Performance, and Belonging”

Jarvis McInnis, Columbia University

“We the Machines Inside the Machine”: Technology, the Black Body, and the State”

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11:45-1:00pm

Panel 2. Something About Sound
405 Kent Hall
Jeramy De Cristo, University of California Santa Cruz
“Bessie Smith and the Orthophonic Anatomy of Electric Speech”

Gerwin Gallob, University of California Santa Cruz
“Phonographic Lines of Flight: Tracking Blackness in Dub Techno”

Jessica Teague, Columbia University
“Recording the Jazz Auto/Biography: Mister Jelly Roll and Treat it Gentle”

Panel 3. The Gothic
301 Philosophy Hall
Aubrey Porterfield, Vanderbilt University
“Places of Remembrance: Gothic Machines in the Fiction of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes”

Connor Tomas Reed, CUNY
“OK First Thing’s First I’ll Eat Your Brains”: Minaj and Buck, Interdisciplinariscreams, and Gothic Life”

JT Roane, Columbia University
“Scalar Economies of Visuality in the (Re)production of Race: The Case of Early 20th Century Physical Anthropology and the Contemporary HapMap Project”

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1:15-1:45pm

Lunch

301 Philosophy Hall

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1:45-2:45pm

Lunch Time Keynote

301 Philosophy Hall
Fred Moten, Duke University

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3:00-4:15

Panel 4. Documenting Disaster
301 Philosophy
Elizabeth Frye, University of Texas Austin
“Revising Disaster’s Gaze: The Multimedia Poetics of Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes”

Nikolas Oscar Sparks, Duke University
“Fugitive Images: Hurricane Katrina and the Movement of the Photograph”

Autumn Womack, Columbia University
“Seeing is Beleiving?: The “Interesting” Family of Postmaster Frazer
Baker and the Ethics of Looking”

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4:30-6:00

Panel 5. Circulation and New Diasporas
301 Philosophy Hall
Edna Bonhomme, Princeton University
“Race and Biopolitics in between 1820 and 1850 in North Africa: French portrayals of non-European in Popular and Scientific Texts”

Kathleen DeGuzman, Vanderbilt University
Seizing “Wonderful Devices”: Richard Wright, George Lamming, and the Possibilities of Paratextual Technology

Ryan Jobson, Yale University
“Black Gold: Petroleum Circuits and African Diasporic Dialogues

Christopher Smith, OISE/University of Toronto
“Isaac Julien’s “Sound Clash” and The Audibility of Queer Diasporas”

Panel 6. Social Media, Mediated Socialities
405 Kent Hall
Kevin Loughran, Columbia University
“Understanding Race and Viral Videos: Social Media, Digital Place-
Making, and Online Identity Construction”

Anthony Cooke, Emory University
“The Ness Thread”
Kiley Acosta, University of New Mexico
“Visual Vocabularies, Virtual Communities: Race, Representation and
Black Feminist Resistance in Cuban Hip-Hop Media”

Joshua Bennett, Princeton University
“Chasing the Moonwalker: Reading Race, Disability and Technology in the work of Michael Jackson”

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6:15-7:00

Evening Keynote

301 Philosophy Hall
Alondra Nelson, Columbia University

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7:00-9:00

Reception
301 Philosophy Hall

My People? Blackness, Diaspora, and Race

Yesterday a dear friend sent this YouTube video to me. Earlier that day we were in a seminar discussing the relationship between “blackness”, racial schema, and black socialities and found ourselves grappling with the visual, social, and sonic attributes of blackness. This video speaks across these terms/frameworks and also gets us really excited for Alondra Nelson’s keynote “Roots Revelations: YouTube and the Politics of Diaspora”.

Rocket to the Moon, pt. 2

“Whitey on the Moon,” featured on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), anticipates and animates Bearden’s collage in the previous post. Unfortunately, in this snippet from Gil Scott-Heron: Black Wax Plus ‘Is That Jazz’ (1980) cuts off in the middle of Scott-Heron’s own juxtaposition that maps on the white flight, the space race, and the making of the black urban ghetto onto the policing of national borders and frontiers of citizenship.

Rocket to the Moon, pt. 1

Rocket to the Moon (1971) is a serious intervention by Romare Bearden into the visual life of technology. His juxtaposition not only suspends and grafts seemingly disparate lived experiences, but he also effectively draws out lines of criticism with his sharp blade. Here, we are invited to meditate on two simultaneous movements: space travel and the makings of the urban ghetto. The technological advancements and cold war political campaigns that are represented in what is called the “space race” also index a disproportion in government funding and a literal kind of white flight. This linkage between the extraterrestrial frontier and another kind of highness seem to suggest a that there is escape-hatch or momentary relief to be found in the joint. But such a flight is met with a red light and sharp left into a unsteady structure filled with screams and moans that are nevertheless drowned out by the rockets roar. (If only we can make sense of the black panther watching over the scene.) Still, there is much to ask: where is technological progress articulated? How do we take seriously the relationship between technology and black culture, especially when images such as this suggest that there was already something black about space travel well before Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Guoin Stewart Bluford, Jr. arrived on the scene? And lastly, how does the gravity of this scene–the push and pull of poverty and national pride–augment the social work of technology? These are just provisional questions, of course. But the will surely be in the air on Friday, Oct. 28th.

More to come.

The Power of Technology

Some people love microform. There is something quite nice about the rhythm that comes with loading, rolling, and printing. And some people, for quite obvious reasons,  hate mircoform. Regardless of where you stand on the microform debate, thanks to the tireless efforts of librarians and archivists at UMass Amherst, all of our lives have become a little bit easier and a lot more interesting. UMass has long been the repository  for the expansive WEB DuBois papers and they were recently digitized!!!

Check out the press release here http://www.library.umass.edu/about-the-libraries/news/press-releases-2011/libraries-unveil-credo/

Here is just one of the treasures that you can now easily acess.

 

 

 

 

 

Graph as Technology

If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Schomburg’s blog consistently posts cool findings from their vast archival collections. One of my favorites is the October 3rd post found here http://schomburgcenter.tumblr.com/tagged/Black_Macho_and_the_Myth_of_the_Superwoman

But in the spirit of our upcoming conference, this graph depicting the of enslaved Africans in the Americas allows us to think about the ways in which the graph operates as a technology of social control, or alternately, as a platform for expressing new social formations. More simply put, what are the limitations or possibilities that inhere in the graphical form?

Make sure to check out their blog @ http://schomburgcenter.tumblr.com/

 

 

 

Optic White

One day when I entered the bathroom in my apartment, I found a thing that bothered me: my roommate’s toothpaste.  (I don’t intend to publicize my roommate’s untidy habits or something.) He uses “Optic White.”

Maybe I a bit overreacted, but I associated the name of Colgate’s toothpaste with Ellison’s ”If you’re white, you’re right” episode of the “Optic White” paint:

“You know the best selling paint we got, the one that made this here business?” he asked as I helped him fill a vat with a smelly substance.
“No, I don’t.”
“Our white, Optic White.”
“Why white rather than the others?”
“‘Cause we started stressing it from the first. We make the best white paint in the world, I don’t give a damn what nobody
says. Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through! … Well, you might not believe it, but I helped the Old Man make up that slogan. ‘If It’s Optic White,
It’s the Right White,’” he quoted with upraised finger, like a preacher quoting holy writ. “I got me a three-hundred-dollar
bonus for helping to think that up. “
“‘If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White,’” I repeated and suddenly had to repress a laugh as a childhood jingle rang through
my mind: “If you’re white, you’re right,’” I said.

Probably, one might think that it’s just a toothpaste, but its name produces the desire associated with color. Its advertisement says, “The Hottest Thing in Whitening has Arrived.” Advertisement is not a producer of pleasures, but kind of a stimulator of desires and pleasures. In a way, this $2.99 commodity produces racial indexicality. And the ideology involved in naming “optic white” is not a trivial thing to be overlooked, for we’re using toothpaste every day. Consciously or unconsciously, does the color ideology of this everyday commodity inculcate the logic of the “optic white” paint into us?

http://www.colgate.com/app/ColgateOralCare/Whitening/ColgateOpticWhite/US/EN/HomePage.cwsp?cid=ppc_gg_b_stan_brand+optic+whitening_&kw=colgate%20optic%20white