Join us Wednesday, March 31st 4:30pm-6pm EST
With a welcome from School of Communication Dean Karin Wilkins, and opening remarks from Dr. Jafari Allen, director of the UM Africana Studies Program.
Blackness has been (and continues to be) under attack globally, but particularly within our country.
As universities grapple with some of the wider-ranging and material effects of racism, particularly anti-Blackness, three scholars engage questions about the relationship of racial identity to social movements, media production, and intellectual property.
Dr. Lisa M. Corrigan draws from her most-recent book Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties to understand how racial feelings shape politics and how racial politics shape feelings.
Dr. Alfred L. Martin, Jr. extends his work in The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom to discuss the imagination and commodification of Black audiences and the ways that structures media production practices.
Dr. Anjali Vats engages discussions of Blackness and intellectual property from her new book The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of American to examine how American understandings of creatorship prevent Black people from owning and protecting their creative works.
Taken together, these books make timely and important interventions into contemporary national conversations and the authors are excited to engage in lively conversation.
This program is collaboratively hosted by The School of Communication, The Center for the Humanities, The Africana Studies Program, and the American Studies Program.