ISRRAR Event–Dr. Jason Young, “Look for Me in the Whirlwind: Toward an Ecology of Afro-Futurism”

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.