ISRRAR Event--Dr. LaKisha Simmons, "The Ancestors and the Womb are One: Black Motherhood and Histories of Black Infant Loss"
2021-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant and child loss emerge twin concepts of generation and Black relationality, which enable a theory of Black motherhood as connected to survival and remembrance. The concept of generation reveals how Black women in the 1930s defined themselves as mothering their children after Emancipation and yet as inheriting the ever-present enslaved past through their own mothers and grandmothers. Black women articulated a sense of self and well-being that was in conversation with the ancestors and unborn.
Join this Zoom event here: https://bit.ly/3hVdvP4.

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

History Club Weekly Meetings
2021-01-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-02-04 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-02-11 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-02-18 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-02-25 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-04 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-11 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-18 19:00 - 21:00 | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

Mia Dragnic and Pierina Ferretti: "An Expansive Rebellion: Feminism and Social Revolt in Chile"
2021-02-01 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Pierina Ferretti and Mia Dragnic García, sociologists and doctoral candidates in Latin American Studies at the University of Chile.
In October 2019, Chile experienced its largest social revolt since the return to democracy in 1990. The mobilization, which began as a spontaneous reaction to protest against a 0.30 USD rise in the Santiago transport fare, soon after became a widespread outburst against the precarious and unjust conditions that affect the majority of the population after almost fifty years of life under a neoliberal regime. Throughout Chile, high school and university students, young precarious professionals, residents of peripheral neighborhoods, sectors of a fragile and unstable “middle class”, soccer hooligans (a symbol of popular and stigmatized youth), qualified salaried workers and unqualified, retirees and older adults, office workers, and app workers, among others, joined together in mass demonstrations.
As an immediate antecedent to this revolt in Chile, there had been a recent emergence of a new wave of the feminist movement that has since caused a general awareness of sexist violence, sexual abuse, and the need for an abortion law, issues that today they occupy the center of social debate. One can see the underground work that Chilean feminism has carried out for many years and that has gained symbolic capital – this is key to understanding how it has moved from private malaise to collective revolt today. Feminism has acted in Chile as an expansive rebellion, starting with women and sexual dissidents and has advanced towards the politicization of broad social sectors, preparing the conditions for mass revolt.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=[REDACTED]
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

LAIS Tertulia | "Race and Caste in Latin America, India, and the USA: A Global Conversation"
2021-02-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Latin American and Iberian Studies invites you to a Tertulia in the Time of COVID, 2020-2021! Two History Department faculty members will speak at this exciting event.
In her widely acclaimed book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson complicates the category of race, as it is commonly understood in the US, by bringing caste to the fore. She discusses the “caste” historical experience of the US in light of those in Nazi Germany and India. Insofar as the term “caste” was first introduced in India by the Portuguese at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese empires had a global colonial reach, Wilkerson’s book provides a perfect pretext for the Program in Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) to launch a global conversation. In this roundtable, UCSB faculty from Black Studies, History, and LAIS specialized in the US, India, and Latin America discuss their take on caste, race, and Isabel Wilkerson.
Speakers (UC Santa Barbara)
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities in global markets. His essays have appeared in A Cultural History of Western Empires, the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, English Language Notes, and the edited volume Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently working on a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
Cecilia Méndez is a Peruvian historian specialized in the social and political history of the Andean region. She is the director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara and an Associated Professor in History. Her work calls the attention on the importance of late eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century political developments in shaping modern conceptions nationhood, citizenship, and “race.”
Terrance Wooten is an Assistant Professor in Black Studies. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, “Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender,” which examines how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated through social policies, sex offender registries, and urban and architectural design. His scholarly interests are located at the intersections of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, studies of poverty and homelessness, and carceral studies.
Join the Zoom meeting here: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84061612112.

Public History Colloquium Event–”Reinterpreting Slavery and the Emotional Labor of History”
2021-02-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, February 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Professor Hilary N. Green (University of Alabama).
Professor Green reflects on the powerful legacy of Jim Crow era efforts to erase the history of slavery from the landscape of her workplace, the University of Alabama, and shares a project she pursued to rewrite this historical narrative. She researched, designed and implemented a campus tour to tell the actual history of slavery and enslaved workers in the University’s past. She collected oral tradition and pursued deep archival research, to historicize “the experiences, activism and collective memories of African American men, women and children,” and describes her efforts to get the campus community to rethink its understanding of the past, even as an untenured member of the faculty. Her project exposed the racist structures undergirding the University Archives; it highlights the tenacity of older narratives and exposes some of the physical and psychological burdens of this sort of historical recuperation for the practitioner. All this unfolded in the larger social struggle over historical monuments and commemoration in recent months. As Green writes, “when exploring the racial history of one’s employer, the Jim Crow era archival project of white supremacy is no longer an abstract concept read about only in scholarship.”
Register for this Zoom event at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yzLVlQ62QNGv7sZz1DenDA.
To download the flyer for this event, click here.
Recommended reading:
• Hilary Green, “The Hallowed Ground Tour: Revising and Reimagining Landscapes of Slavery at the University of Alabama,” in-progress seminar paper.
• Hilary Green, “The Burden of the University of Alabama’s Hallowed Grounds,” The Public Historian 42: 4 (November 2020): 28-40.

Lucía Cavallero: "Gendered Violence and Financialization of Social Reproduction: A Feminist Perspective On Debt"
2021-02-08 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Lucía Cavallero, a doctoral candidate in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires.
The presentation will focus on the relationship between sexist violence and economic violence, specifically the financialization of life and the increase in gender-based violence. It will highlight the Latin American feminist movement’s struggles against debt as articulated in the tactic of the March 8 International Women’s Day Strike and in Argentina’s Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) movement.
See Lucía’s articles “Debt and the Violence of Property” (Verso 2020) and “A feminist perspective on the battle over property” (Feminist Review 2020), both co-authored with Verónica Gago.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElduGopjorEtfsRKUqNx8CcKzu8_VhM43a
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. Jason Young, "Look for Me in the Whirlwind: Toward an Ecology of Afro-Futurism"
2021-02-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Speaking before a rapt audience, famed black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, vowed to support the cause of African liberation not only in life, but also in death, insisting that he would return as an “earthquake, or a cyclone, or plague, or pestilence” to aid in the fight for freedom. He implored his followers: “Look for me in the whirlwind.” Using Garvey’s promise as a starting point, Dr. Jason Young (University of Michigan) reconsiders the history of slavery with an eye trained on the transformative role that torrential rains, gale force winds and raging fires played in both opening and closing paths to freedom and resistance. And in view of the current climate crisis, COVID-19, and yet another national reckoning on racial injustice, Young imagines the role that rising sea levels, receding coastlines, and global fugitivity might play in the Afro-futures to come.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

Capps Center Event: Speech, White Supremacy, and Insurrection
2021-02-09 18:00 - 19:30 | Zoom, CA
The January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol brought to the fore the threat that white nationalist forces pose to our democracy. Join the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life for a conversation about these forces, their history, and what can be done to resist them. Our guests will be UC Free Speech Fellows Ryan Coonerty (Santa Cruz County Supervisor) and Melissa Barthelemy (Public History doctoral candidate), and Dr. Katya Armistead (Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Student Life).
Register via Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-xSYflSySEGpGbop0ZfULg.

Public Lecture: Investigating a Minoan Coastal Town in East Crete: New Work at Palaikastro, 2012-16
2021-02-18 15:00 - 16:30 | Click to register: https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pWh9A2IRSaSTPDbMWlJ43w, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
A lecture by Prof. Carl Knappett (University of Toronto), sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in cooperation with the UCSB Departments of History, Classics, and Art History & Architecture. This is the AIA’s endowed Joukowsky Lecture, free and open to the public.
Click here to register for this event.

LECTURE ABSTRACT
Palaikastro is one of the most intensively excavated settlements of Minoan Crete. Yet, we still understand relatively little of its urban organization, and how the town fit in its wider landscape. In this talk I report on a five-year project (2012-16) that has conducted excavations in a new neighborhood on the edge of town, while also applying techniques of landscape analysis to look at the site’s environmental setting. Besides the themes of urban development and landscape use in the Bronze Age, I will also touch on issues concerning collaborative research, community involvement, and the politics of the past.

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar I: Sovereignty and the Political
2021-02-19 13:00 | Zoom, CA
The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the inaugural session of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The conversations will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves as a focal point to discuss themes like sovereignty, empire, and racial capitalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our inaugural webinar will engage Prof. Herman Bennett’s emphasis on sovereignty and the importance of the political in understanding the history of race in the world. Registration for the webinar is required. Please click on the link below to register.
Date: 19th February 2021
Time: 1:00 PM
Webinar I: Sovereignty and the Political
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_31FRU_q0QYiZ46ABcHCvkw
Featuring presentations by Juan Cobo Betancourt, Elizabeth Digeser, Adam Sabra and Sergey Saluschev.
Comment by Hilary Bernstein.

Juan Cobo Betancourt is a historian of race, language, religion, and law in colonial Latin America, co-founder of Neogranadina, and the author of Mestizos Heraldos de Dios (2012).
Elizabeth Digeser is a historian of religion, philosophy, Roman politics, and conversion in Late Antiquity, and the author of A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (2012).
Adam Sabra is a historian of poverty, charity, aristocracy, and Islam in medieval and early modern Egypt, and the author of Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt 1250-1517 (2000).
Sergey Salushchev is a historian of slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century Caucasus under Russian imperialism. His dissertation analyzes the region as a permanent borderland, a site of cultural exchanges, translational commercial networks, contested memory, and imperial rivalries.
Hilary Bernstein is a historian of urban culture and history in early modern France, and the author of Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France (2020).

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Rasul Miller, "Black Internationalism and Black Sunni Muslims in America"
2021-02-23 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as artists, organizers, and propagators of Islam for over a decade in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, and were deeply impacted by its Black internationalist political and cultural character. Upon moving to Brooklyn Heights in 1930 they built one of the twentieth century’s most influential Muslim religious communities in the US. In this talk, Dr. Rasul Miller (History, UC Irvine) explores the impact of Black internationalism on this formative Black Sunni religious institution, and the broader Black Sunni religious and cultural orientations it helped to foster.
Join this Zoom event here: https://bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

AfroLatinx Voices Series: Re-Writing Black Religions in the Atlantic World--A Conversation with Andrea Mosquera-Guerrero
2021-02-25 12:30 | Zoom, CA
How might we re-write the history and historiography of religion, race, and art in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world? Prof. Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco) will discuss the role of historians in uncovering and debating ideas about the past of people of African descent during the colonial period. She invites us to consider the ways art, material culture and performance can help us understand how people lived and experienced different forms of religiosity in the past, and how these practices helped develop different forms of Catholicism and cultural changes across the Atlantic world. She will also share her experience with the Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras (Ibero-American Network of Historians), a digital humanities initiative that seeks to promote dialogues and connect historians across the globe.
Dr. Andrea Mosquera-Guerrero is a researcher at the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Researchers, Mexico) and co-founder of the Iberoamerican Network of Female Historians. She specializes in Afro-Latin American cultures in the Atlantic world during the colonial period, focusing on issues related to race and art.
Moderator: Andreína Soto is a Ph.D. candidate in History at UC Santa Barbara who specializes in African diaspora, legal and religious history, and digital humanities methods.
Zoom event: REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. You will receive a confirmation email with the link and password to the event. This event will be in Spanish and English interpretation will be available through the Zoom interpretation feature. This event will be recorded. If you require an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please contact Janet Waggaman at clas@berkeley.edu.

¿Cómo podríamos re-escribir la historia y la historiografía sobre religión, raza y arte en América Latina, el Caribe y el mundo atlántico? Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera discutirá el papel de los historiadores en el descubrimiento y el debate sobre el pasado de las personas afrodescendientes durante el período colonial. Nos invita a considerar las formas en que el arte, la cultura material y el performance pueden ayudarnos a comprender cómo las personas vivían y experimentaban diferentes formas de religiosidad en el pasado, y cómo estas prácticas ayudaron a desarrollar diferentes formas de catolicismo y cambios culturales en el mundo atlántico. También compartirá su experiencia con la Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras, una iniciativa de humanidades digitales que busca promover el diálogo y conectar a historiadores alrededor del mundo.
Dra. Andrea Mosquera-Guerrero es investigadora del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (México) y es co-fundadora de la Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras. Se especializa en las culturas afro-latinoamericanas en el mundo atlántico durante el período colonial, y se enfoque en las cuestions de arte y raza.
Moderadora: Andreína Soto es candidata de doctorado en historia en UC Santa Barbara. Andreína se especializa en estudios de la diáspora africana, historia de las leyes y la religión, así como métodos de humanidades digitales.
Evento por Zoom: SE REQUIERE REGISTRO. Recibirá un correo electrónico de confirmación con el enlace y contraseña para el evento. Este evento será en español, y habrá interpretación en inglés a través de la funcionalidad de interpretación de Zoom. Si necesita una adaptación para participar plenamente en este evento, comuníquese con Janet Waggaman clas@berkeley.edu.

Adrienne Edgar, "Mixed Children in Soviet Central Asia: Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging"
2021-02-25 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom, CA
The UCSB Department of Political Science‘s Identity Politics Group invites you to join them at a Workshop in which Professor Adrienne Edgar (History, UCSB) will present a chapter from her forthcoming book, Intimate Internationalism: Mixed Marriage in Soviet Central Asia. The chapter to be discussed is “Mixed Children in Soviet Central Asia: Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging.”
Professor Paul Spickard (History, UCSB) will serve as the discussant.
To obtain a copy of Professor Edgar’s chapter in advance, email Kristen Thomas-McGill at kthomasmcgill@ucsb.edu.

Mónica Michelena: "We Are Charrúa Women: From Negation to Re-Existence in Our Body-Territory"
2021-02-26 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Mónica Michelena, Secretary of the Charrúa Nation’s Council and former Advisor on Indigenous Affairs for Uruguay’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014-18).
Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As subjects of legal right, they are reconfiguring their existence and re-existence in their great ancestral-territory-body. This collective search has led Michelena to academic spaces.
In 2011, Michelena began an investigation with rural Charrúa women in Uruguay’s interior to question the nation-state’s devices of invisibility and to expose counter-memories as part of an attempt to disarm the social and symbolic representation of their extinction. Through a methodological approach based on collaborative ethnography, Michelena’s research aims to rearm the great quillapí of memory. The metaphor of quillapí – a leather cape made from patchwork – implies that each woman is the bearer of a small piece of memory and, among all, they are sewing together its scraps. Down this path, Charrúa women began to slowly gain recognition from the Uruguayan feminist movement, in a slow process of internal decolonization.
Zoom link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcscu2urjkpEtMCu4cVNRoiyQe_J-RtAr1Y
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

CWWG Workshop--Addison Jensen, "WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs"
2021-02-27 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom, CA
On Saturday, February 27, from 2 to 4 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will host a workshop. They will read and discuss a dissertation chapter, “WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs,” by Addie Jensen, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department.
This workshop is part of a new CCWS initiative, the Cold War Working Group (CWWG), a collaborative, graduate student-led group designed to provide a supportive, welcoming environment for graduate students working on or around the Cold War and international history. The workshops provide an occasion for graduate students, faculty, and others to join together as peers to read, and provide feedback on, scholarly work in progress (dissertation chapters, journal articles, etc.) by members of our community. We strongly encourage other UCSB graduate students and faculty members to consider submitting their own work for discussion in future workshops.
If you wish to participate in the February 27 workshop, please email Addie (who is also serving this year as the CCWS Graduate Fellow) at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu, and she will provide you with the password to access her dissertation chapter, along with a Zoom address.
Please join us for this exciting event!

Launch Party for the UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History
2021-03-02 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History is about to release its first issue, and its editors and contributors cordially invite the public to its Zoom launch party on March 2. The event will feature a short Q&A featuring four of the ten undergraduate authors and moderated by members of the editorial team.

To celebrate the Journal‘s launch, use this Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86005899456

Humanities Decanted--W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture"
2021-03-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Humanities Decanted series invites all to a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Audience Q&A will follow.
Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to create visually and sonically interesting multimedia works. This new artwork emerged from corporate laboratories, artists’ studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses and it involved some of the biggest stars of the art world. Less famous and often overlooked were the engineers and scientists who contributed time, technical expertise, and aesthetic input to these projects. These figures included the rocket engineer-turned-artist Frank J. Malina, MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes, and Billy Klüver, a Swedish-born engineer at Bell Labs who helped establish the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology. This book restores the role of technologists to the foreground, explores the era’s hybrid creative culture, and recounts the many ways that artists, engineers, and curators have collaborated over the past fifty years. Making Art Work shows that the borders of art and technology over the past half century are anything but fixed. Just as striking is that the original ideals and ambitions that animated the 1960s-era art-and-technology movement have not faded. Today, creativity, collaborations, and interdisciplinary research are promoted by academic and corporate leaders alike. What emerges is a long history of artists and technologists who have repeatedly built new creative communities in which they can exercise imagination, invention, and expertise.
W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara where his research, writing, and teaching focus on the histories of technology and science. Originally trained as a scientist, he is the author or editor of six books. McCray’s 2013 book, The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, won the Watson Davis Prize in 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”
Registration is required in advance. Register at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YAKxHjklSWqDzHO5Vs8Ngg.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Public History Colloquium Event–”Abina and the Important Men: Graphic History as Public History”
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, March 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Trevor R. Getz (San Francisco State University).
Abina and the Important Men began as an attempt to address a classroom problem: how to teach students about the dual responsibilities of the historian to historical subjects and contemporary audiences. These goals both drove its development as a graphic history. Fortuitously, its publication caught the leading edge of the rehabilitation of that medium as a serious scholarly mode of communication. This great graphic shift is part of a wider realignment of both the history discipline and popular culture, and it provides both opportunities and pitfalls for the scholar who wishes to share their work with a broader public while retaining its authenticity and maintaining its accuracy. This is a discussion by the author of Abina and the Important Men about what he has learned since its publication in first edition in 2012, with some arguments about the future of the graphic history genre. The graphic novel can be obtained through the Oxford University Press website, or the community-built 2-D animated video version can be watched here (Password: [REDACTED]
Register for this Zoom event at http://bit.ly/abina-webinar.
Recommended video/reading/short links:
• “How to Design a Comix Page” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dQEfL2BfUM
• Julia Alekseyeva, “Form, Function, and Style in the Graphic Essay,” Sequentials Journal, 1.4 (May 2020).
https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue1.4/alekseyeva.html?fbclid=IwAR0_bxgktwVoNr6TEcWjSeVogcZjM_U36FhvB6GpHXs8mhSfMKSc9PgTz0k
Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois, “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti,” The Nib (Feb. 5, 2018).
https://thenib.com/haitian-revolution/
• Nick Sousanis, “No Sides,” Spin, Weave & Cut (blog), http://spinweaveandcut.com/no-sides/
• Charis Loke & Max Loh, “The Word for World is Image,” Singpowrimo, 20.2:
https://www.singpowrimo.com/features/wordimage?fbclid=IwAR2WSiuLQKWT3EkbJvtBPdC7UmLWquXuduKUGLibIi9sA5jby-sCf1cLqLg
Other recommended readings:
• Trevor R. Getz, “Getting Serious about Comic Histories”, American Historical Review, 2018, 123, 1596-1597.
• Barbara Tversky, “Visualizing Thought”, Topics in Cognitive Science, 3 (2011), 499-535.
• Neil Cohn, “In defense of a ‘grammar’ in the visual language of comics”, Journal of Pragmatics, 127 (2018), 1-19.

History Associates: Luke Roberts, "A Samurai Wife Divorces her Lout of a Husband"
2021-03-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Associates for an engaging presentation from UCSB History Professor Luke Roberts on a specific case that influenced gender roles in 19th-century Japan.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149
Mori Nao, a young samurai wife in Japan, desired a divorce from her abusive husband in 1824. Legally a man could divorce his wife but a wife could not divorce her husband. Nevertheless, she persisted in the face of his adamant refusal to divorce her. Soon her relatives mobilized their social networks to convince his relatives to pressure him to give her a divorce, but he still refused. Eventually most samurai in her lord’s domain in southwestern Japan were working to get her a divorce and even the lord became involved in supporting what she had no legal right to demand, and threatened the well-being of the husband’s kin group.
Finally, the husband divorced her. His angry kin put him in a cage in his backyard where he was forced to live for some months. No formal record survives, but a detailed diary of the process made by one relative of his house who played an important role in the negotiations reveals much about gender roles, family networks and common disjunctures between law-as-written and law-as-it-operated.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Samiha Rahman, "Redefining Black Excellence: Ihsan, Islamic Education, and the Tijani Sufi Order"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African American Muslim youth have migrated to the West African Tijani Sufi town of Medina Baye, Senegal. They hope to circumvent the antiblackness, Islamophobia, and economic inequality they face in the U.S. in search of a transformative educational encounter in a society where Blackness and Islam constitute the dominant norms. This talk chronicles these young people’s everyday experiences pursuing Islamic education in Medina Baye. Complicating popular notions that link Black excellence to individualistic material gain and Black capitalism, Dr. Samiha Rahman (CSU Long Beach) argues that Black Muslim excellence (ihsan) provides an alternative paradigm rooted in the pursuit of human excellence through spiritual and social practice. Grounded in a transatlantic Black Muslim tradition, Black Muslim ihsan offers African American Muslims pathways to individual and collective liberation.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

IHC Talk: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Cannabis and South Asia"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Asian/American Studies Collective welcomes UCSB History professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya for a talk on the role of cannabis in South Asian experiences of empire.
Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed into a race-d and gendered mode of explaining anticolonial insurgency by South Asian rebels. The intoxicating substance of the plant, in the discursive logic of empire, was seen to vitiate Asian bodies against European power. Cannabis also animated other imperial operations like the delegitimization of Indian sovereignty. Using the expansive reach of imperial periodical culture in the nineteenth century, this paper highlights the Asian and global contexts within which cannabis became an alibi for rebellion or violence against empire.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the UC Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and studies the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities. His work has appeared in the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, and Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently writing a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
This event will be held on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=[REDACTED]

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
2021-03-12 13:00 | Zoom, CA
Building on the collective knowledge shared in our first webinar, the History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the second session of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The conversations will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves, as a focal point to discuss themes like sovereignty, empire, and racial capitalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our second webinar will engage Prof. Herman Bennett’s emphasis on empire and colonialism in understanding Atlantic history and the politics of liberation from a wide diversity of scholarly standpoints. Registration for the webinar is required. Please click on the link below to register.
Date: Mar 12, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kI2R6miRRO2blZUh_62shQ
Featuring presentations by Anthony Greco, Katie Moore, Stephan Miescher, and Ya Zuo
Comment by Evelyne Laurent-Perrault

Anthony Greco is a historian of engineering and technology, colonialism, and science in the modern Middle East. His dissertation research examines Egypt’s long tradition of scientific knowledge and pedagogy. Before this, he worked as a diesel mechanic, plumber, and carpenter which inspired his interest in builders and maintainers of public works.
Katie Moore is a historian of early American political economy, money, debt, and the Atlantic World, and the author of the forthcoming A Revolutionary Currency.
Stephan Miescher is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Ghana, masculinities, and environmental history, and the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005) and coeditor of Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges (2015).
Ya Zuo is a historian of middle and late imperial China, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, and emotions, and the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (2018).
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault is a historian of the African diaspora in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, the political imagination of enslaved women, and the author of the forthcoming Claims of Dignity.

8th Annual Van Gelderen Lecture: Sasha Coles, “The Great Silk Experiment: Silkworms, Mulberry Trees, and Women Workers in Mormon Country, 1850s-1910s”
2021-03-14 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Dr. Sasha Coles.
From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and sell. By most measurements, they failed. Homegrown silk was time-consuming, onerous, and practically impossible to profit from, primarily due to superior imported goods from Europe and Asia. Even so, this talk will show how the homegrown silk industry provided Mormon women with a venue to make their own money, shape transnational labor and commodity markets, and understand ever-changing environmental conditions. In these and other ways, Mormon women used silk production and consumption to resolve tensions between economic cooperation and competition, market isolation and integration, and religious exceptionalism and American citizenship.
Our speaker, Sasha Coles, defended her UCSB Ph.D. dissertation successfully in February 2021. She received her M.A. from UCSB in 2015 and her B.A. from Arizona State University in 2013. Her publications include two articles in historical journals, and she has developed a website on the Walt Disney theme parks.
The Zoom link for this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture is https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.
