Participants:

Maboula Soumahoro, Université de Tours François-Rabelais -- “The Hexagon and the Triangle: The Intersectional Body

Oyeronke Oyewumi, Stony Brook University -- “Decolonizing Knowledge: Gender & Feminism in Question”

Elisabeth Spettel, Stony Brook University -- “Black Women in Contemporary Art: Deconstructing the Colonial Gaze”

Moderator:Crystal Fleming, Stony Brook University

Welcome by Kathleen Wilson, HISB Director

Introduction by Crystal Fleming, Stony Brook University

Film clips showing from Ouvrir La Voix, directed by Amandine Gay

Maboula Soumahoro, Université de Tours François-Rabelais -- "The Hexagon and the Triangle: The Intersectional Body”

This presentation will seek to expose and discuss some of the questions raised in my current work-in- progress: a study devoted to the processes of racialization and expressions of blackness in their relation to citizenship in contemporary, metropolitan France, a locale de facto Afrodiasporic although de jure blind to race and racial categories.

Elisabeth Spettel, Stony Brook University -- “Black Women in Contemporary Art: Deconstructing the Colonial Gaze”

Oyeronke Oyewumi, Stony Brook University --  “Decolonizing Knowledge: Gender & Feminism in Question”

The global system is characterized by White Supremacy. Its materiality has been well documented. However, how coloniality subjugates indigenous knowledge and marginalizes local epistemes has not been adequately studied. Oyewumi’s discussion will focus on the category gender and other allied concepts as the starting point of a decolonial strategy.

Maboula Soumahoro  is Associate Professor at the Université de Tours François-Rabelais, France. Her research focuses on U.S. and African American studies, the African diaspora and Atlantic black nationalisms. She has taught at Bard College (Bard Prison Initiative) and at the Paris Institute of Political Science (France).  Based in France, Soumahoro is president of the Black History Month association and served a member of the National Council for the Memory and History of slavery between 2013 and 2016. In 2016-2017, she is Visiting Faculty at Bennington College and Barnard-College-Columbia University.

Oyeronke Oyewumi teaches in the department of Sociology. Born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of two books and editor of three anthologies. The monograph Invention of women:) won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association. Oyewumi’s latest book is What Gender is Motherhood.

Elisabeth Spettel is an instructor in the field of French Caribbean Literature in the African Studies Program at Stony Brook University.  She specializes in slavery and segregation through African-American female artists.  She has published articles in Recherches Feministes, Synergies, Etudes Litterairees. Her next article about slavery and feminism on Sam Vernon and Wangechi Mutu's artworks is forthcoming in Black Renaissance Noire.

Crystal Fleming is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. Her work (which has been funded by national fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, as well as numerous grants) explores how people of African descent interpret, respond to and transcend oppression. Her book Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, based on her award-winning dissertation, was published by Temple University Press in February 2017.