Home > Reviews > Walter rodney speaker series boston

Walter rodney speaker series boston

It was named after Walter Rodney, the Guyanese scholar and political activist murdered in his native country in , whose best-remembered book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , has long been considered a classic in African studies. The lecture series is interdisciplinary, and has included presentations by established and incipient scholars in all Africa-related disciplines, including history, anthropology, political science, economics, sociology, public health, literature, visual arts, musicology, religion, Islamic studies, international relations, and public diplomacy. Currently, the seminars are all accessible via Zoom, but some hybrid in person events will be offered that will retain Zoom accessibility. You can see our line-up for the Fall semester here and on our Calendar. Sign up for our Weekly Brief email to stay updated on event announcements.


We are searching data for your request:

Walter rodney speaker series boston

Schemes, reference books, datasheets:
Price lists, prices:
Discussions, articles, manuals:
Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.
Content:
WATCH RELATED VIDEO: The Walter Rodney Commemorative Symposium @ York college

Walter Rodney


Pick up a paper, or turn on the news today and you will likely come across discussions about reparations, the re-ordering of the global financial system, disconnect of the people from a political process that claims to represent them, etc.

It is always a good time to read Walter Rodney. So voracious was his appetite for thinking, writing, questioning, educating that it can feel like there is a Walter Rodney book, essay, argument for every question, dilemma, paradox. Almost forty years after his assassination, the world has changed tremendously. And as the experts in this roundtable maintain, more useful than looking at Rodney as a man ahead of his time, is looking at how the questions and concerns have morphed and taken different manifestations—and how we have failed or succeeded in tackling them.

His lesson of the importance of looking at the many worlds we live in and meeting them with courage and clarity remains. From then to now, Guyana to the world. My professors presented him as one of the stalwarts of the black intellectual tradition. As I pondered his oeuvre, it became clear to me, even then, that he personified the Africana tradition—his commitment, as a historian, to a transnational approach to the black world.

I was particularly impressed with the extent to which he worked to master the local realities within a global landscape, and the ease with which he traversed the global and the local in his analyses of different historical periods. In many ways, he provided a model for the type of scholar I wanted to become. At the time I was working on the research that became Visions of Zion , and I was interested in the relationship between the spiritual and political elements of Rastafari.

For a movement to be powerful enough to encourage people to move across the world to Shashemene, Ethiopia, there are a range of forces involved. What Campbell, through his discussion of Rodney, provides is a way of engaging with the spiritual power of Rastafari alongside the revolutionary politics of the movement. Groundings with my Brothers further expands on the importance of the act of repatriation and the need for reparations.

As a young self-proclaimed radical, I was looking for solutions for the apocalyptic reality that I then faced the re-election of George W. Bush alone felt like the end of the world. Walter Rodney represented something that was both concrete and abstract. He was as much an intellectual as he was an example. While Rodney was a brilliant thinker that exhibited a stunning attunement to the enduring life of imperial power, he also stood in for a boundless set of revolutionary ideals that, at times, have little connection to his own.

Rodney was source of inspiration but he also had a more significant and somewhat unexpected effect on my thinking. Like how Saidiya Hartman approaches her historical figures; that is to say, we start to apprehend his impact when we attend to the gap between his proper name and the existence that it signifies.

It is in the gap that we discover the erotic underpinnings of intellectual life. Rodney very much brought me into the fold of an expansive and ever changing social form a tradition?

When I read Rodney for the first time I was also coming to contact with the immeasurable range of political desires and passionate attachments formulated in his name. In other words, Rodney was an occasion for thinking with others—that includes my professors, older activists, Steve, and the dread with his peanut punch at Roy Wilkins Park. This was in the s. That story often came out in lectures and general discussions.

But more immediately we learned of his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. At the UWI every history major must take courses in Caribbean history. The same was true for Rodney when he was a student there in the early sixties , for me when I arrived thirty years later, and for all incoming students today. In those classes we learn not only of the Caribbean, but also quite naturally of Europe and Africa. African history came to us through a need to understand what the continent was like prior to the beginning of the European trade in Africans which they enslaved.

In a reflective comment on his early years as a university student in Jamaica, Rodney commented that his Caribbean history course exposed his deep lack of knowledge about Africa. This is important to note. It reflects the heavy influence of a colonial curriculum that Rodney and his peers had. It was that generation, the generation of independence in the sixties, who broke through that silence in the Caribbean academy.

It began with Elsa Goveia in the s, a brilliant Guyanese professor of history who insisted on the teaching of Caribbean history on its own and not as a corollary to European history. And it continued with Rodney who took seriously the need to learn more about Africa so he studied it. So Rodney entered my consciousness first as a pioneering historian of Africa who also happened to have been trained in the same department at the same institution where I was.

That alone made him stand large in my mind. It was often repeated on campus that Rodney earned his doctorate at This marveled us no end and elevated him to an almost unreachable level. It also intrigued me to learn more about him, his ideas, and how he drew from and influenced the environment around him. As I read more about his life, especially his terrific Walter Rodney Speaks , I became more intrigued.

I was 17, and turned 18 on the New Year as I voraciously researched social change and revolutionary theory during that school year […] It was an Eritrean dissident studying at ODI who first insisted I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , one night during a long discussion at the check-out desk. He also insisted that I live and work in Africa if I was to truly understand the development dynamics I was trying to grasp. I checked How Europe out that night, and spent much of the New Year break reading it deep into the night in the room I rented in Islington.

Underdevelopment theory and his grounded analysis of colonialism explained a major missing piece in my understanding of the plight of modern Africa and its position in the world economy, and led me to Nkrumah , Julius Nyerere , back to Lenin, and also to Samir Amin , Issa Shivji, A. When I embarked on my senior year of undergraduate study in Kenya in , I settled in a rural part of the central Kenyan coast, in a village plagued by squatter evictions and land issues stemming from the period of slavery, which had only ended there in But How Europe Underdeveloped Africa far and away provided the essential framework I needed to understand both the colonial and neocolonial history I was wrestling with.

Stories from when they saw him demolish Ali Mazrui in their debates at Makerere University, and also stories about his years in Tanzania, around the Dar School of historiography. I realized that he was not just a brilliant theorist and historian , but also an amazing person who had the power to engage ordinary people wherever he was, in ways that left the most lasting of impressions.

This has been a recurring theme for me, in my studies and work in the US and around the world, and distinguishes Rodney for me from almost all other scholars I have worked on.

Later, when I got to graduate school in Binghamton, NY, during the s, around the world systems school of sociology that was based there, his work helped me see beyond the Eurocentric formulations many of my comrades and professors held, and also helped me hold fast to the framework of neocolonialism rather than the vastly more popular postcolonial conception that was in vogue at that time and still is.

My thesis focused on the evolution of one group within Rastafari, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Groundings provided the epistemological foundation for my own work even beyond the thesis , which takes seriously the intellectual offerings of Rastafari. Rastafari had been marginalized and ostracized in colonial and post-independence Jamaica, and the understanding that they were ignorant, backward, laughable, and even insane, remained pervasive in when Groundings was first published.

I already had fixed Groundings into a narrative prior reading a single page. This narrative was not unlike the narratives of liberations that structured my political thought back then. I mainly turned to the past in search of historical figures, overlooked texts such as Groundings , and marginalized social movements that, once drawn into the present, would unlock a revolutionary future.

I thought that I had to find the missing key to our salvation, the person or thing that would allow us to reclaim the revolutionary future that the past promised us. Reading Groundings disabused me of my habit of approaching the past in search of counter-narratives. It forced me to realize how the narratives of liberation that once structured my ways of thinking politically had actually constrained my political imagination. Reading Groundings today demands that we interrogate pre-established ideas of black and anticolonial freedom and even that sacrosanct thing we call the black radical tradition.

As my student years progressed at Mona so too did my fascination with Rodney. That book has had an enduring presence among Jamaicans interested in that critical period of radical politics in the late sixties. Reading it first in the mids, it emphasized, in ways profound and straightforward, the anger and passions of We were learning the frame of the story in our lectures.

What was it about this brilliant young man that so terrified the government they chose no other course but to ban him? This was new to me, and that it happened to someone who carried such reverence in the institution and among the lecturers I was drawn to, only fascinated me more.

So when I read Groundings , it opened a world for me. Like the reggae music I had always heard but never truly understood before that period in my life, it made that era of black power tangible. It was not just his analysis of Jamaican society that did it for me; it was the language he used to describe the society and its contradictions. This was a pivotal moment in my understanding of the construction of the society to which I belonged.

As I processed my years of Middle East and African fieldwork from my undergrad years, I also engaged heavily in the activism then engulfing our campus. By the time class started, I had become a leader in a social movement that was occupying the administration building around demands for a more diverse curriculum, preventing the arming of campus police, and a host of multicultural issues of student representation.

So I held our first session of class inside the building takeover, where I had the students sit in a circle on the floor somewhere to the side of the main lobby that was the center of our occupation.

In my Freirian tradition and in the spirit of the Marxist circles I had been a part of in London, we each took turns reading a paragraph from How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , and then discussed it as a group.

We all wondered how this legendary figure could have graced our campus some fifteen years earlier and yet there was almost no memory of him, no building or room named for him. Walter Rodney Speaks was central for us, and was even adopted by a sympathetic professor, and helped me cohere my commitment to what Rodney called the role of the radical or guerilla intellectual.

Like Ward Churchill, who spoke on campus in late during one of our student uprisings, Rodney stressed the obligation to ground in the community where we were, the importance of the university as a site of struggle, and together they helped us commit to blending our studies with deep political engagement and struggle outside of class.

But Groundings had an especially profound impact for me and for my comrades then, as it explicitly engaged and exemplified the Black Power struggles that prefigured our s social movements around multiculturalism, diversity, identity politics, and representation. Here was a text that answered the raging false questions of race versus class, and showed us that far from being a theoretical abstraction, these questions were a matter of specific historical conditions and realities that had to be studied in their specificity, and were in almost all cases a matter of deeply entwined configurations.

We were also reading Audre Lorde and Sylvia Wynter under the tutelage of our primary scholar-mentor, Carole Boyce Davies, the most engaged and committed professor we had in that period. Wynter, who had known and worked with Rodney in Jamaica and other places, would visit campus and become engaged in our work on several occasions, and ended up joining George Lamming as one of our keynote speakers at the Rodney conference.

What is one segment or anecdote or observation from Groundings that really stuck with you and why? I encountered Groundings when I was speaking with a range of people in Shashemene, Ethiopia, about their perceptions of the incoming repatriate community. It is hard to choose one bit of the book. We are so inferior that if we demand equality of opportunity and power, that is outrageously racist!

Of course, Rodney was responding to the fact that the Jamaican government had used the protocols of the newly formed nation state to refuse him re entry into a majority black, Caribbean, and African diasporic space after he attended the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Canada.

The post-independence period had yielded the reality that nationalism as the strategy for liberation from colonial rule had produced its own hierarchies, structures of power, and tools of repression.

While continental Africans emerging from colonial rule easily found their roots on the African continent from which they had not been displaced, many in the Caribbean rejected African heritage in favor of the multi-racialism that had come to mark state-driven notions of national identity as was the case in Jamaica. He also highlighted the contradiction that has historically defined Jamaica: a history of anti-colonial black radicalism alongside a history of the type of conservatism that reflects the impact of colonial thinking and values.

The protests that erupted in Jamaica as a result of the banning represented a watershed moment in the history of radical movements within Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean more broadly. Black radicals in the Caribbean, like their counterparts across Africa and its diaspora, had begun to see the complexity that would mark the period of decolonization.

Finally, beyond its rhetorical power, this statement from Rodney has stayed with me because it continues to speak to contemporary debates about nationalism and its discontents.

It is a harmonious multiracial society, we are told. It is an integrated society, we are told.


Groundings with Walter Rodney

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under 35, held once each January, March, May, July, September, and November. The series seeks to promote and bolster Massachusetts poets under 35 while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets under If you are a poet under the age of 35, sign up to read! This program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency which is funded by the Mass Cultural Council, and administered by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture.

The Berklee College of Music in Boston, Cornish School of the Arts in on Music in Terezín as a part of the UT Martin Academic Speakers Series.

President’s Colloquium on Race and Racism


Walter Anthony Rodney 23 March — 13 June was a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and academic. He was assassinated in Walter Rodney was born in into a working-class family. He attended the University College of the West Indies in and was awarded a first-class honours degree in History in His dissertation, which focused on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by the Oxford University Press in under the title A History of the Upper Guinea Coast — and was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the topic. Rodney travelled widely and became very well known internationally as an activist , scholar and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania during the periods —67 and — and in at his alma mater University of the West Indies at Mona , Jamaica. He was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. He was also a strong critic of capitalism and argued that only under "the banner of Socialism and through the leadership of the working classes" could Africa break from imperialism. On 15 October , the government of Jamaica, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer , declared Rodney persona non grata.

Walter Rodney, African Studies, and the Study of Africa

walter rodney speaker series boston

He is an exemplar. Walter Rodney was a Guyanese historian and activist who was assassinated in June Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on 23 March He was in the student cadet corps, as well as being a high jumper and a debater. Rodney learned Portuguese and Spanish during this period to add to his knowledge of French which he had learned at Queens College.

Pick up a paper, or turn on the news today and you will likely come across discussions about reparations, the re-ordering of the global financial system, disconnect of the people from a political process that claims to represent them, etc.

A Bibliography of Works By Walter Rodney, compiled by Laurette Telford.


The lecture series is interdisciplinary, and has included presentations by established and incipient scholars in all Africa-related disciplines, including history, anthropology, political science, economics, sociology, public health, literature, visual arts, musicology, religion, Islamic studies, international relations, and public diplomacy. We also include virtual Africa-related events and activities that are free and open to the public. The Center for African Studies will consider requests to host, coordinate, sponsor, or co-sponsor Africa-related events only if the event is supported by one of our faculty affiliates. Please note that the calendar also includes events and activities hosted by organizations and entities not affiliated with the Harvard University Center for African Studies, and CAS makes no claim of endorsement or responsibility for the content of these activities. Please e-mail africa harvard. The Center for African Studies will consider requests to host, coordinate, sponsor or co-sponsor Africa-related events only if the event is supported by one of our faculty affiliates.

Walter A. Rodney and the Instrumentalist Construction and Utilization of Knowledge

Schmidt Boston University. The lecture series is interdisciplinary, and has included presentations by established and incipient scholars in all Africa-related disciplines, including history, anthropology, political science, economics, sociology, public health, literature, visual arts, musicology, religion, Islamic studies, international relations, and public diplomacy. We also include virtual Africa-related events and activities that are free and open to the public. The Center for African Studies will consider requests to host, coordinate, sponsor, or co-sponsor Africa-related events only if the event is supported by one of our faculty affiliates. Please note that the calendar also includes events and activities hosted by organizations and entities not affiliated with the Harvard University Center for African Studies, and CAS makes no claim of endorsement or responsibility for the content of these activities. Please e-mail africa harvard.

Please join me as I present preliminary dissertation findings WALTER RODNEY LECTURE SERIES Boston University African Studies Center Kwibuka.

How to publish with Brill. Fonts, Scripts and Unicode. Brill MyBook. Ordering from Brill.

My research has explored the history of social movements in the U. Black Bodies Swinging: An American Postmortem Metropolitan Books is a genealogy of the Black Spring protests of by way of a deep examination of state-sanctioned racialized violence and a history of resistance. To understand how we arrived at this moment requires a different kind of autopsy—an historical postmortem that can lay bare the structural conditions responsible for premature death. It exposes not only effects of racist policing but the extraction of wealth from black people, land dispossession, displacement, predatory lending, taxation, disfranchisement, environmental catastrophe, and the long history of looting through terror and government policies that suppressed black wages, relieved us of property, excluded black people from better schools and public accommodations, suppressed black home values, and subsidized white wealth accumulation. The Texas-born journalist, granddaughter of Confederate slave owners, daughter of a once wealthy cattle rancher and Indian fighter, began her career as a correspondent for several Texas papers during the s and 50s, eventually worked as a staff writer for President Lyndon B. Johnson, before setting out in to chemically darken her skin and live as a black woman for a year.

You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

Lester E. Edmond , 99, died June 21, in Washington, D. Edmond received a B. Army during World War II. He served as a combat infantryman with the st Infantry Regiment.

Rodney s doctoral thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, established him as one of the leading authorities on the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas. His best-known work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is the first major historical study of African development, in which Rodney challenged the prevailing assumptions about African history and put forth his own ideas and models for analyzing the history of oppressed peoples. In The History of the Guyanese Working People, Rodney penned the first authoritative, systematic historical study of the working class in the Caribbean and racial division in Guyana. Rodney received numerous awards, scholarships and honors and is described as having a rare gift of intellect by renowned Barbadian writer George Lamming.




Comments: 4
Thanks! Your comment will appear after verification.
Add a comment

  1. Dougul

    Earlier I thought differently, I thank for the help in this question.

  2. Faujas

    Absolutely agree with you. In it something is also excellent the idea, agrees with you.

  3. Mordke

    have you invented such an incomparable answer?

  4. Seadon

    I propose to look for a site, with articles on the topic that interests you.