Racial Justice: Art(s) and Activism

Sponsored by the Georgetown University Departments of African American Studies and Performing Arts and the Racial Justice Institute

The Racial Justice: Art(s) and Activism lecture series, honors Georgetown University’s recent initiative to highlight art, activism and racial justice by focusing on work by literary, visual and performance artists whose art serves the ongoing struggle to produce new forms of racial freedom.


Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stanford University
Monday, January 28, 2019 | 3:30-5:00 p.m.

Free Form: Art, Activism and Racial Justice
By Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stanford University  

This event, part of the Racial Justice: Art(s) and Activism lecture series, honors Georgetown University’s recent initiative to highlight art, activism and racial justice by focusing on work by literary, visual and performance artists whose art serves the ongoing struggle to produce new forms of racial freedom.

Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery  (3535 Prospect St., NW)


Mr. Paul Miller (DJ Spooky)
Tuesday, February 12, 2019 | 3:30-5:00 p.m.

Mr. Paul Miller (DJ Spooky)

This event, part of the Racial Justice: Art(s) and Activism lecture series, honors Georgetown University’s recent initiative to highlight art, activism and racial justice by focusing on work by literary, visual and performance artists whose art serves the ongoing struggle to produce new forms of racial freedom.

McNEIR HALL, NEW NORTH BUILDING


Thursday, March 21, 2019 | 3:30-5:00 p.m.

Playing with Fire: Sound, Transcendence, and Protest in African Diasporic Ritual Performance
By Dr. Melvin Butler, University of Miami

This talk explores black music as a means of claiming cultural legitimacy and contesting forces of racialized oppression. Drawing on ethnomusicological fieldwork in African American and Caribbean ritual contexts, it examines “heated” music making as an embodied cultural strategy of resistance and protest. Theologies of sound and transcendence lend themselves to creative modes of spiritual warfare, through which practitioners hope to effect positive social transformation in the here and now. Dr. Melvin L. Butler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. He specializes in music and religion in Haitian, Jamaican, and African American communities.

ALUMNI HOUSE (3604 O Street, NW Washington, DC 20057)


Wednesday, September 11, 2019 | 12:30 p.m.

The Next Jubilee: Black Music and the Possible Impossible
By Dr. Shana Redmond, University of California-Los Angeles

Shana L. Redmond is an interdisciplinary scholar of music, race, and politics. Prior to receiving her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University, Redmond studied Music and African American Studies at Macalester College where she trained as a vocalist. Throughout her education and career, music has been at the center of her thinking—as subject, agent, and method—and activates her research and teaching interests in racial formation, political cultures, nationalism, labor, and decolonization. Her focus has been to understand the ways in which music is used as a strategy within the liberation politics and social movements of the African world.

McNEIR HALL, NEW NORTH BUILDING


Read more about the Racial Justice Institute in The Hoya.