Events
The Racial Justice Grand Challenge Initiative hosts seminars, workshops, lectures, and events that explore and shed new light on the social and cultural formations surrounding justice, freedom, and democracy. We are a co-sponsor of the Black Worlds Seminar that draws scholars from across the country who share new and in-progress research on topics such as interrelated struggles for racial justice, practices of resistance, and dreams of freedom across Africa and its diaspora.
Upcoming Events
Spring 2024
Refashioning: Postcolonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures Symposium
March 28-29, 2024
This Caribbean Studies symposium will focus on the interconnected demands for reparation for slavery in anticipation of havoc wreaked by climate change. We will convene an array of scholars from Vanderbilt and beyond who work across the Caribbean, particularly those who allow us to put the Hispanophone and Francophone in conversation with the Anglophone. Our hope is that this symposium will result in a special journal issue so that the work begun here can continue and find a broader audience.
Black Worlds Keynote Event: Charisse Burden-Stelly (Wayne State University)
April 5, 2024, 6:00 p.m.
Central Library Community Room
Author of the highly anticipated Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States will discuss his book, which encourages readers to think about the ways the supposed presence of “outside agitators” and “communist influence” has been used by state and non-state actors to delegitimize demands for substantive Black freedom and racial justice.
Past Events
Fall 2023
Black Worlds Seminar: Jésus Ruiz (Vanderbilt)
September 25, 2023
Transatlantic Kingdoms: The Politics of Royalism in the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1795
Black Internationalism in the Age of Emancipation
September 29, 2023
This workshop, co-sponsored with the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies, convened scholars who raised questions about the ways enslaved people themselves conceived of slavery and freedom, with consequences for present thinking about persistent inequities and partial freedoms. The workshop will result in a special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era.
Black Worlds Seminar: Nicholas McLeod (University of Cincinnati)
October 30, 2023
A Conversation with Wadada Leo Smith
November 28, 2023, 4:10 p.m.
Central Library Community Room
As part of a week-long residency at Vanderbilt, accomplished musician, composer, and educator Wadada Leo Smith will speak with Anthony Reed, professor of English and Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts, about his work and the role creative practice can play in struggles for justice.
Spring 2024
Black Worlds Seminar: Jarvis McInnis (Duke University)
January 26, 2024, 12:00 p.m.
RPW Center (downstairs conference room)
A Conversation with Gregg Hecimovich (Furman University)
February 8, 2024
Community Room, Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt alumnus Gregg Hecimovich will discuss his book The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. Hecimovich authenticates Crafts as the author The Bondswoman’s Narrative, the first African American woman novelist.
Black Worlds Seminar: Danyelle Valentine (Vanderbilt)
February 23, 2024, 12:00 p.m.
RPW Center (downstairs conference room)
Black Worlds Seminar: Rebecca VanDiver (Vanderbilt)
March 22, 2024, 12:00 p.m.
RPW Center (upstairs conference room)
Black Worlds Seminar
Hosted in partnership with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Black Worlds Seminar draws scholars from Vanderbilt and across the country to present works-in-progress to faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Although presenters have their own areas of focus, the uniting themes involve location—ways of inhabiting spaces and historical moments—and its antithesis, dislocation—ways people of the African diaspora are materially and psychically displaced.
Even where our inquiries foreground the United States, we consider the U.S. in relation to other parts of the world. Our collective attention to Black histories and communities will emphasize the ways intra-national migration, international expatriation, and diasporic immigration expand our notions of Black life. The global interconnectedness of identities, practices of domination, and the production of space shape Black life and will therefore inform our study of it.