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Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the fraught terrain of word and image in the twentieth-century construction of black identity. Marking painful historical moments that both frame and extend the parameters of racialized existence, Brown seeks to reconcile the import and utility of African American art practices heavily dependent on the visual. Using works from Audre Lorde, Michael S. Harper, and Lucille Clifton alongside photographs by Roy DeCarava and Carrie Mae Weems, she will explore the layered contingency of imagery within the arena of black subjectivity.

Brown is currently lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research and teaching gather at the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies. Her book (forthcoming from Duke University Press), The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary examines contemporary representations of slavery that emphasize the repetition of black women’s corporeal practices in the aftermath of the event of slavery.  A second project, Their Dead Among Us: Photography, Melancholy, and The Politics of the Visual, will explore the photographic dispossession of the body of the other and patterns of exclusion engendered by these ocular practices. 

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, Departments of Art History and Africana Studies, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Note: This talk will also be live streamed on Bowdoin's Live Webcasts page.

With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan; some visible, others not. The film Hafu explores the intricacies of the multicultural experience in modern day Japan as it follows the lives of five "hafus"-the Japanese term for people who are half Japanese-in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. It examines the issues of race, diversity, multiculturalism, nationality, and identity within this new community to answer the question of what it means to be hafu, to be Japanese, and ultimately, what all of it means for Japan. 

Filmmaker David Conover will screen his recently-produced eight-minute film created for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.

The Auschwitz Gateway Film is a compelling and heartbreaking introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust at the largest concentration camp of the Nazi era, and will be shown to museum visitors before they walk through the infamous Arbeit Macht Frie ("work makes you free") gateway to enter the camp.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Conover and Professor of English and Cinema Studies, Aviva Briefel.

Free and open to the public. No tickets required.

Despite the importance of understanding the mechanisms and consequences of mutation, few parameters related to the rate, spectrum, and effects of spontaneous mutation have been estimated. In this talk, Sarah Schaack discusses the dynamics of mutation at small and large scales, within and between lineages, over short and long time periods of time (e.g., empirically-derived estimates of base substitution rates to reports of frequent horizontal transfer among eukaryotes).   

She presents a few short vignettes to highlight the utility of using a variety of study systems and approaches to tackling questions related to understanding the accrual, maintenance, and loss of genotypic and phenotypic mutational variance genome-wide. She also highlights her recent work on the dynamics of mobile DNA (transposable elements and endogenous viruses) which constitute a very significant portion, and in many cases the majority, of the genome in most plants and animals.

Schaack is assistant professor of Biology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon

Gabriel Perez-Barreiro delivers a keynote lecture exploring the ways in which various artists from Latin America used science and space travel as metaphors for expressing present day realities and imagined futures.

Perez-Barreiro is Director of the Coleccin Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York. From 2002 to 2008 he was Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin. In 2007, he was chief curator of the Sixth Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. From 2000 to 2002 he was Director of Visual Arts at The Americas Society, New York. Prior to that he was Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator at the Casa de America, Madrid. From 1993 to 1998 he was the founding curator of the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art. He holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex.

Join us for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Spring Open House immediately following the lecture at 5:30pm.

RSVPs are requested but not required. You many RSVP here: https://latitude008791.eventbrite.com or contact Christine Piontek at artmuseumevents@bowdoin.edu.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas.

Photo: Gabriel Perez Barreiro

Boston University film professor Mary Jane Doherty traveled to Cuba multiple times over a period of years to complete what the Boston Globe called a “lucid, watchful portrait of young ballet dancers desperately trying to plié their way out of poverty and into the Ballet Nacional."

Doherty’s documentary Secundaria follows one high school class on its journey through Cuba’s world famous National Ballet School.  The teenage dancers love to dance…but many of them must dance as the only way to improve the lives of their impoverished families. 

As we follow Doherty’s primary subjects—middle-class Gabriela, poor Mayara, poorer Moises— Secundaria reveals itself through cinematic storytelling (and without a script, staging, or interviews) as being less about competing in dance and more about battling into adulthood.

Post-screening discussion with the filmmaker.

Free and open to the public - no tickets required.

Craig Steven Wilder, professor of history at MIT and a leading historian of race in America, will deliver the annual John Brown Russwurm Lecture in the Main Lounge of Moulton Union. A reception in the Russwurm House Library will precede the lecture at 5:00pm. Both events are free and open to the public. 

Professor Wilder will examine the contrasting figures of "the matriculating Indian" and "the uneducable Negro" to explore the limits on access to higher education in the second half of the 18th century. Looking closely at the experiences of two friends, the Reverend Samson Occom - a member of the Mohegan nation who became a Presbyterian minister, and poet Phillis Wheatley - the first African-American woman to be published, Professor Wilder will demonstrate how illusory were even the modest hopes of education held by Native and enslaved Americans. Though hailed by well-wishers as possessors of exceptional talents, Occum and Wheatley could find no institutional structures that would support them in intellectual, literary, or religious pursuits. 

This lecture stems from Wilder's important and widely reviewed new study, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, where he argues that many of America's revered colleges and universities were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color.

Professor Wilder is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a guest lecturer, commencement speaker, academic advisor, and visiting professor. For more than a decade, this innovative program has given hundreds of men and women the opportunity to acquire a college education during their incarcerations in the New York State prison system. 

He has advised and appeared in numerous historical documentaries, including the celebrated Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon film, The Central Park Five; Kelly Anderson's highly praised exploration of gentrification, My Brooklyn; the History Channel's F.D.R.: A Presidency Revealed; and Ric Burn's award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary History. 

Named after the first African-American graduate of Bowdoin College (class of 1826), the John Brown Russwurm lecture series explores "the legacy and status of Black Americans". Notable speakers include Robert Levine, Lani Guinier, Carl Stokes, Vernon Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Hooks, and Julian Bond, among others.

In his work Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, Craig Steven Wilder argues that many of America's revered colleges and universities were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. 

Nearly everything we do is premised on the assumption that the world we know will endure into the future and provide a sustaining context for our activities. But today the future of a viable biosphere, and thus the purpose of our activities, is put into question. A disappearing future leads to a broken present and a strange incoherence in the feel of everyday life. We thus face the unprecedented challenge of salvaging a basis for our lives today. 

The world of climate politics is increasingly no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. 

In this presentation, Stacy Vandeveer will examine the world of climate change governance and the implications for the field of global environmental politics. He is currently professor of political science and chair of the department of political science at the University of New Hampshire. His teaching and research interests include international environmental policymaking and its domestic impacts, comparative environmental politics, connections between environmental and security issues, the roles of expertise in policy making and the global politics of consumption and environmental and humanitarian degradation. 

After Japan surrendered in 1945, ending World War II, Allied forces led by the United States occupied the nation, bringing drastic changes. Japan was disarmed, its empire dissolved, its form of government changed to a democracy, and its economy and education system reorganized and rebuilt. By the 1950s, a former enemy became a Western ally, and parts of American culture became part of the Japanese landscape. This was not, however, an era of unadulterated “influence” from the West, nor a simple abandonment of domestic politics for a new devotion to transnationalism. This was a time that was ambivalent and uncertain, challenging and rousing. To be an avant-garde artist in this context meant that one aimed for lofty ideals: to restructure one’s own sense of place in the world, through art and for art. 

Artist Nakamura Hiroshi's work in this period was influenced by the American military occupation of the Japanese town of Sagawa, and the conflicts between the townspeople and soldiers. His paintings came to represent the genre of Reportage Painting, in which young artists expressed Socialist concerns through their art in a style combining Social Realism and Surrealism. 

Dr. Namiko Kunimoto, assistant professor of art history at Ohio State University, is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, urbanization, photography, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She will examine how Nakamura Hiroshi used representation to interrogate the inter-relationship of artistic status, politics, and selfhood. 

Sponsored by The Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund and the Departments of Art History and Asian Studies.

Most discussions of Malcolm X's life tend to emphasize his politics and downplay the role of religion in his life. Or, if they do address his religion, these examinations often see Islam as something that Malcolm truly embraces only after leaving the Nation of Islam and making his hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. This talk examines the ways that religion in general, and Islam in particular, figured very early in Malcolm's life, and provided a passport for his growing internationalist politics.

Zaheer Ali is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University. Under the direction of the late Manning Marable, he served as one of the project managers and a senior researcher of the Malcolm X Project (MXP), a multi-year research initiative on the life and legacy of Malcolm X.

Free and open to the public.

Prior to the events of the Arab Spring, it was believed that controlled liberalization and the emergence of hybrid authoritarian regimes—what scholar Daniel Brumberg termed liberalized autocracies—contributed to authoritarian stability in the Middle East and North Africa.  

In this talk, Brian Mello challenges these assumptions by identifying a set of causal mechanisms that emerged within liberalized autocracies that help to explain why the wave of protest in the Arab Spring began in and contributed to regime change primarily in such hybrid regimes. He concludes by examining what this wave of contentious politics might mean for the future of liberalized autocracy and democracy in the region.

Brian Mello is Associate Professor of Political Science at Muhlenberg College. He is author of Evaluating Social Movement Impacts: Comparative Lessons from the Labor Movement in Turkey(2013, Bloomsbury Academic).