"Rethinking the Popular Arts in a Global World"
Professor Simon Gikandi
Professor of English, Princeton University
Monday, January 28
6:00pm, 612 Schermerhorn
Dept. of Art History and Archaeology

Professor Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. His major of fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britian, the "Black" Atlantic, and the African Diaspora. He is also interested in the encounter between European and African languages in the modern period, literature and human rights, and writing and cultural politics. He is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. His latest prize-winning book is Slavery and the Culture of Taste, which argues that slavery was constitutive of the culture of refinement and taste that developed in Britain and the United States in the Eighteenth Century. He's also published several provocative interventions in the literature on PIcasso and primitivism.

MALI: FRENCH WAR, AFRICAN PEACE?
Gregory Mann and Roland Marchal
Tuesday, January 29, 2013 5-6:30 p.m.
East Gallery, Buell Hall

FREEDOM PAPERS: AN ATLANTIC ODYSSEY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION
A roundtable with Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard
Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 6-7:30 p.m.
East Gallery, Buell Hall

"Kenya at the Crossroads: Election 2013"
A panel discussion with Fabienna Hara, Abdullahi B Halakhe, Jackie Klopp Elections in Africa Series
Tuesday, February 5, 2013, 4-6pm, 1512 IAB

"Minerals, Mines, and Workers in Extractive Economies"
A panel discussion Anya Shiffrin, Hannah Appel, Tutu Alicante
Worlds of Work in Africa Series
Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 5-7PM, 509 Knox Hall

A History of Motherhood in Nineteenth Century Uganda
Speaker: Rhiannon Stephens, Columbia University
Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 6pm-8pm, Faculty House

Abstract: This paper traces the very different ways in which people mobilised motherhood as a social institution and an ideology in central and eastern Uganda as they faced the rapid economic and political changes of the nineteenth century. It argues that this was a period of contradictions in relation to motherhood?s role in the societies of the region. Motherhood remained central to social cohesion, particularly in the east, in a continuation albeit not unchanged of a much older tradition. This was reflected in the power wielded by queen mothers and in the political and ritual importance of a woman?s children to her kin. At the same time and especially in Buganda, men sought often through violence to undermine both the queen mother?s authority and the importance of her family in the kingdom. These tensions came to a head at the end of the century with the imposition of colonial rule and the exclusion of women from power.

Daniel Hoffman, University of Washington
"The Work of War, War as Work"
Worlds of Work in Africa Series
Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 4-6pm, 1512 IAB

"Informal Work and the Rise of Social Entrepreneurship"
Worlds of Work in Africa Series
A Conversation with C. Sara L. Minard, and Grace Davie, author of "The poverty question and the human sciences, 1850-2012," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in late 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013, 4-6pm, 1512 IAB

Jesse Shipley, Haverford College
Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music
A book discussion and film screening
Worlds of Work in Africa Series
Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 4-8pm, 509 Knox Hall

"Phenomenology of Islamic Prayer"
A conference led by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Friday, April 26, 2013, 10am-5pm, 509 Knox Hall

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