2020 - 2021 Radical Kinship Series
Bios reflect speakers' status at the time of their presentation at the Center for Race and Gender.
Afro-Latinx Feminisms in the URL & IRL Spheres
02.18.2021 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar
Garifuna journalist and founder of award-winning platform, “Ain’t I Latina?,” Janel Martinez, will join Dominican visual artist and sociocultural critic, Zahira Kelly, in a roundtable discussion on Afro-Latinx feminist practices as they play out in online and offline spaces. Centering their digital reporting and criticism, this roundtable asks: How has social media expanded the ways Black Latinxs see themselves alongside others in the Black diaspora? What might a Black future look like if we merge Afro-Latinx URL with Afro-Latinx IRL spaces; and, Who are Black feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean redefining their own thinking?
Co-sponsored by the Multicultural Community Center, Center for Latin American Studies, Berkeley Center for New Media, UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative, UC Berkeley Graduate Women’s Project, and the UC Berkeley Sexual Orientation and Gender Advocacy Project.
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Rituals For Grief & Love: A Reading with poets Sade LaNay And Sasha Banks
01.28.2021| 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar
Join us in celebrating two new poetry collections, I love you and I’m not dead by Sade LaNayand america, MINE by Sasha Banks. Released at the beginning of COVID-19, both poets’ work cannot be any more timely. LaNay and Banks’ collections each take the approach of archival resurrection to name and imagine Black life outside conditions of social death. In I love you and I’m not dead, LaNay’s investment is not only their spiritual and physical healing, but the healing of Black women across time and space whose claims to freedom were loud and somewhere across the archival narrative, misread as quiet. As LaNay declares, “Disbelief does not undo the validity of an experience.” In a similar poetic sensibility, america, MINE demands that readers confront America’s history of racial and gender violence because “endings exist” and the end of the nation is coming. In leaning on rituals of radical conjuring, LaNay and Banks draft roadmaps of fugitive escapes that make Black life in the future possible.
Co-sponsored by the Multicultural Community Center, Center for Research on Social Change, UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative, UC Berkeley Graduate Women’s Project, and the UC Berkeley Sexual Orientation and Gender Advocacy Project.
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Black Trans Intimacies: On Building Futures in the Present
10.29.2020 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar
In this roundtable, trans and nonbinary artists and scholars came together to discuss the ways in which intimacy is rendered and re-imagined in our contemporary moment, and how intimacy serves as a world-building tool. Dora Santana of John Jay College, SA Smythe of UCLA and Micky Bradford of the Transgender Law Center will share their craft(s) and speak of their work as a form of intimacy with the world and against patriarchy and anti-Blackness. This event aimed to ask: what kind of intimacies do we need today for all Black trans and nonbinary people to be free tomorrow? And, as Dora Santana’s “Mais Viva!: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism” (2019) asks, “How do we imagine possibilities of livable lives, of freedom, well-being, and transformative change, as we resist death?
Co-sponsored by African American Studies, Gender Equity Resource Center, Othering & Belonging Institute’s Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster, and Othering & Belonging Institute’s LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster.
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“#BLACKLIVESMATTER and Indigenous Resistance: Thinking Through Intersectional Movements
09.17.2020 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar
We invite you to join us for the first installment of “Radical Kinship,” a new series curated and hosted by CRG’s Arts and Humanities Initiative Research Scholar, Alan Pelaez Lopez.
In this first installment, Amber Starks and Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga will discuss Afro-Indigenous resistance, contradictions and their radical possibilities. Starks, known as @MelaninMvskoke on social media, is a Black Mvskoke (Creek) citizen whose tweets and Instagram art encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing struggles. A doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, Agbasoga’s work illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black/Afro-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and modern state formation in México.
Co-sponsored by African American Studies and Native American Studies.
LISTEN - Click to hear #BLACKLIVESMATTER And Indigenous Resistance