Archive | Special Events

ANNOUNCING Call for Papers and Panels: “Unleashing the Black Erotic:Gender and Sexuality-Passion, Power and Praxis”

By whitneyal on April 10, 2013 in Current Activities, Special Events

Avery Research Center is inviting proposals from across disciplines for its Fall 2013 Conference and Symposium: “Unleashing the Black Erotic: Gender and Sexuality-Passion, Power and Praxis”. This conference and symposium seeks to articulate the wide, varied, and expansive nature of gender and sexuality, and the performance of both. It also aims to teach us how to understand, embrace, and harness the power, beauty, and essence of the erotic as a key to our positive evolution as people.

We invite proposals from across disciplines. We are most interested in proposals that address aspects of the following topics:

Black bodies in popular culture
Black sexuality in television, film, and literature
Queering the Black body in art and performance studies
Iconic Black Queer motifs
Sex and Sexuality and Black Faith
Naughty, but nice: Black women and the politics of respectability
Black Erotica, Romance Novels, Comic Books
The Black Body and Public Health
Hip Hop and the Hypersexuality of Black Women
Alternative Modes of Black Love and Family
The Politics and Economics of Porn

The deadline for proposals is May 10, 2013; complete papers due by August 1, 2013. Please
send all paper and panel proposals to friersons@cofc.edu with your name, institution, title,
email address, presentation title and format, along with a 150 word abstract, brief bio, and
recent cv. Please put “Unleashing the Erotic” in your subject line. Presentations will be
limited to twenty minutes.

For additional information, please contact Dr. Patricia Williams Lessane, Executive
Director, Avery Research Center, at lessanepw@cofc.edu and Dr. Conseula Francis,
Associate Professor, English Department and Program Director, African American Studies
Program (AAST) at francisc@cofc.edu.

Information regarding registration, lodging, and symposium schedule will be available on
the Avery Research Center’s website beginning in May 2013.

ANNOUNCING Call for Papers and Panels: “The Fire Every Time: Reframing Black Power across the Twentieth Century and Beyond”

By Aaisha Haykal on February 16, 2012 in Current Events, Special Events

“The Fire Every Time: Reframing Black Power across the Twentieth Century and Beyond”

In the Fall of 2012, the Avery Research Center will host a public history symposium, dialogue, and community event examining the Black Power Movement in the Twentieth Century.

Generally typecast as radical, violent, and ultimately self-defeating, the Black Power Movement has been considered by some as an aberration of the Civil Rights Movement. Still, others have viewed it as a destructive interruption and a politically ineffectual movement that derailed the civil rights agenda, resulting in white backlash, conservative retrenchment, and urban unrest.

Recent scholarship, however, has begun to rethink the meaning, geographical placement, periodization, and effect of “Black Power”, revealing deep historical roots in black communities and a profound and far more positive legacy than previously indicated. This conference will bring together activists, scholars, and students to review and discuss the Black Power Movement, its manifestations, and continuing impact.

For more information: http://blogs.cofc.edu/averynews/files/2012/02/Avery-Call-for-Papers-Black-Power-2012.pdf

Exhibit: Lorenzo Dow Turner

By Aaisha Haykal on January 6, 2012 in Current Events, Special Events

The pieces for the exhibit arrived yesterday and we are all excited to see it up and to have people come and view it with us next Thursday, Jan 12th.

Exhibit Opening Information

http://blogs.cofc.edu/averynews/files/2012/01/DowTurnerPostcard.pdf

Exhibit Background Information

The Avery Research Center is excited to host “Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language”, the world-class exhibition developed by the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, in January 2012. This exhibition is a beautiful and thought-provoking assemblage of artifacts, photographs, and text that documents the life and work of Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, whom many scholars consider as the first African-American linguist and the Father of Gullah Studies. It also examines the visceral interconnections between African diasporan cultures on three continents: the Gullah-Geechee communities of South Carolina and Georgia; the Afro-Brazilian community of Bahia, Brazil; and the West African cultures from which the other two were born.

The Turner family had been free for four generations by the time Dow Turner was born in 1890, which helped him pursue a stellar education that included an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His studies eventually led him to the South Carolina Lowcountry and his introduction to the Gullah language. He immediately began to see similarities between it and various African languages. Turner’s curiosity of a language that sounded much like English, yet was without formal academic study, led him to twenty years of research on the language and its people, including many sojourns to West Africa to expand his research.

Before Dow Turner’s research, the Gullah language was unclassified, unstudied, and considered informal gibberish. Using an inquisitive ear, Turner was able to eventually link Portuguese and English words to their myriad of African roots within Gullah, and “Word, Shout, Song” visually and audibly explains this in a magnificent exhibition
Although born on American soil and free at the time of Dow Turner’s studies, the speakers had retained the past of their enslaved ancestors and beyond to their African heritages. In that vein, the Gullah language is a syncretic fusion of the African, American, and European ties that weave through the speakers’ legacies.

Dow Turner’s research helped bridge the gap between the descendants of the enslaved people on the Lowcountry Sea Islands to the descendants of the enslaved people on the mainland—linguistically as well as culturally. The exhibit chronicles all of the research, trips, recordings, and findings through aural and visual means. To have an exhibit not only of this importance, but also of this stature, come to the College of Charleston is an honor and a landmark.

Various generous donations to the Avery Research Center have made this exhibition possible, including the Office of the President at the College of Charleston, MUSC, the MeadWestvaco Community Development and Land Management Group, the City of Charleston, the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the National Park Service.

Honorable Lucille Whipper Goes Back-to-School

By Aaisha Haykal on September 27, 2011 in Current Events, Special Events

Welcome sign on front door of the school

On Friday, September 23, 2011, The College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center cofounder and former South Carolina House Representative, the Honorable Lucille Whipper, went back to school as a part of The HistoryMakers’ Back-to-School initiative. The initiative aims to educate and inform the younger generations about what life was like before they were

Honorable Lucille Whipper talking to the students

born. The Honorable Whipper spoke to approximately seventy-five fifth-grade students at Springfield Elementary School in Charleston, SC. The students were very attentive, took notes, and were very engaged with Honorable Whipper. She talked about her childhood in Charleston, her political and social activism while she was in high school, in college, in her career, and later in her life. What really got the students engaged was her discussion of segregation and the various inequalities that faced African Americans both in Charleston and on a national scale. Notably Honorable Whipper stated the struggle for Civil Rights did not just begin in the 1950s/1960s, but dates back further to the efforts to end slavery.

The Honorable Whipper did not just provide history lessons to the students, but also life lessons, such as the importance of respect for both yourself and for others, the need to love and appreciate the talents one has, and the need to give back to those who come behind you while not forgetting those who came before.

Before the presentation, the Honorable Whipper; Ms. Georgette Mayo, the Avery Research Center’s Processing Archivist; and Aaisha Haykal,

Aaisha Haykal preparing to speak

Avery’s History

Makers Fellow; were able to take a tour of the school with the Principal Ms. Blondell B. Adams.

Ms. Mayo doing introductions

The event was also an opportunity to promote the archival and historian professions to the students. The day before Mrs. Whipper’s visit, the students viewed a brief video about the Avery Research Center. In her introduction, Ms. Mayo discussed what an archivist does and what an archive collects.

The day would not have been possible without the support of Ms. Adams and Ms. Regina Pinckney Stephens, Springfield Elementary School’s Library Media Specialist, Ms. Fanny

Display in the library

Anthony, the library volunteer, and the student helpers, who arranged for the room and the

audio/visual technology. Lastly, we want to thank the Honorable Lucille Whipper for taking the time out of her day to participate in the HistoryMakers initiative and the students for their avid attention.

More photos from this event can be found on Avery’s Facebook page.

Lecture: Freedom’s Teacher, the Life of Septima Clark

By Amanda Ross on February 15, 2011 in Special Events

Out of the archives and into public discourse… For her biography of Civil Rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark, Katherine Mellen Charron drew significantly on the archival holdings of the Avery Research Center. Please join us on Thursday, February 17 as Charron, assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University, lectures on Freedom’s Teacher: the Life of Septima Clark.

Charron’s work traces Clark’s life from her earliest years as a student, teacher, and community member in rural and urban South Carolina to her increasing radicalization as an activist following World War II, highlighting how Clark brought her life’s work to bear on the Civil Rights Movement. Charron’s engaging portrait demonstrates Clark’s crucial role — and the role of many black women teachers — in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle.

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