Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

 

 

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Current lecture program

 

 

 

 

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series in American Culture Studies offers new contributions to the urgently needed intercultural dialogue by inviting scholars and intellectuals to give lectures open to a wider audience that address some of the crucial aspects and problems of public culture and the modes of cultural critique today.

The lectures are named in honor of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 to 1963) an important and influential intellectual, scholar, public figure, and writer of 20th century America. After doing graduate work at Harvard University, he was a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität) from 1892 to 1894. In Berlin he studied with Gustav von Schmöller, Adolf Wagner, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Max Weber. The first African American ever to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, he was subsequently professor of economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and became widely known for his numerous historical and analytical studies of the social, economic, political, and cultural status of black people in the United States. In his famous book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which combined political essays, cultural critique, autobiographical sketches, and fiction, Du Bois elaborated his notion of the inescapable "double-consciousness" that characterizes the lives of black Americans and his vision of the crucial role racial conflicts were to play all over the world in the new century: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He was a co-founder of the racially integrated civil rights organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and organized several Pan-African Congresses (from 1919 to 1945) which addressed the problems of imperialism and decolonization in a worldwide context. As editor of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, from 1910 to 1934, and of Phylon, from 1940 to 1944, Du Bois created a forum for black American literature, cultural and political debate, and social thought that situated African Americans in the wider frame of a revised notion of a multicultural democratic society in the United States and its interrelations with other parts of a postcolonial world. In 1958/59, he received an honorary doctorate from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He emigrated to Ghana in 1961 where he edited the Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.

American Studies in Perspective

In the age of globalization, the gradual unification of Europe, and the increasing awareness of the crucial importance of the political organization of social heterogeneity and cultural differences, a critical engagement with U.S. American culture and society has become ever more urgent. The repercussions of American multiculturalism, the interplay of competing public cultures, the impact of the new media, and the transnational perspectives of American cultural production have fundamentally changed the direction, the academic organization, and the public role of the interdisciplinary project of American Studies in the United States. These new developments not only challenge our understanding of the role American Studies should play in German universities, but also demand a new, genuinely dialogical conception of American Studies that articulates different and conflicting experiences and visions of the future from both sides of the Atlantic in a globalizing context. American Studies in Germany, seen in the wider European frame, can provide a forum in which the most pressing issues of the powerful dynamics of cultural differences, of the reorganization of the production of cultural knowledge, and of the implications of a reconstitution of the public sphere, all of them critical issues for the new Berlin Republic, can be debated in a transnational, comparative perspective.

The American Studies Program at Humboldt-Universität defines its research objectives and curricula in this context. It therefore focuses on the literary and cultural representations of, and theoretical approaches to, categories such as 'race,' ethnicity, gender, class, region, and age, and their complex interrelations within and beyond American society. Literary studies are complemented by studies of other print media, film, television, the internet, and the arts. The American Studies Program is involved in the new interdisciplinary Gender Studies program and cooperates closely with Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and the Modern Literature and Language Departments at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Intercultural dialogues are pursued in collaborative research projects with scholars from the United States and European countries. These activities materialize in a number of student and faculty exchange programs with various American and European universities.

 

 

Summer Semester 2023:

 

• POSTER
• All lectures at Dorotheenstr. 24, room 1.501

 

25 April 2023

Melba Joyce Boyd (Wayne State University)

"Fred Was Feelin' It: Reverberations of the Voice of Frederick Douglass in the Voices of Gil Scott-Heron and Childish Gambino"

 

02 May 2023

Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico and Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin)

"May Ayim's 'Wake Work'"

 

20 June 2023

David Diallo (Université de Bordeaux):

"How Rap Became 'Black': Examining Hip Hop's Foundational Years"

 

 

 

25 April 2023

 

Melba Joyce Boyd (Wayne State University)

"Fred Was Feelin' It: Reverberations of the Voice of Frederick Douglass in the Voices of Gil Scott-Heron and Childish Gambino"

 

6.30 – 8.00 P.M. (CET)
DOR 24, 1501

 

This talk traces the thematic parallels in Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July” in Gil Scott-Heron’s songs from the 1970’s and 1980’s and in Donald Glover/Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” recorded in 2018. The presentation considers the historical circumstances that Douglass addresses in 1852 may have changed; however, the contradictions that permitted slavery to exist after the establishment of the United States as a democracy, were not completely resolved after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment.

This talk will also report Scott-Heron’s in concert in Germany and the impact of his music on the Peace Movement during the 1980’s, facilitating political protest and infusing popular music with fervor and consciousness reflective of Douglass’s message more than a century before. Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) said he recorded “This Is America,” “To give Black folks something to sing on the Fourth of July.” His music video is a performance that extends echoes Douglass’s speech in contemporary imagery, while it simultaneously extends Scott-Heron’s video recordings with haunting themes and historical refrains reflective of both of his predecessors. These thematic parallels and political messages illustrate that the struggle for African Americans to acquire equality and freedom persists almost two centuries since Douglass illuminated the challenges and the contradictions in a slavocracy in 1852.

 

BIO: The 2023 Kresge Eminent Artist, Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd, is a native Detroiter, and a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, and an Adjunct Professor in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. An award-winning author of nine books of poetry, two biographies, editor of two poetry anthologies, and over 100 essays, she is also a documentary filmmaker. She has given lectures and poetry readings throughout the United States and Europe, and her poetry, essays and scholarship about African American literature and film have likewise appeared in anthologies, academic journals, cultural periodicals and newspapers globally. Her latest collection of poetry, Death Dance of a Butterfly, received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry. In 2010, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the Independent Publishers Award, the Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and it was a Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and for the ForeWord Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received the 2004 Honor for Nonfiction from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Boyd’s critically acclaimed and widely reviewed, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, (1994) which was the first comprehensive study of this Black woman poet, fiction writer and essayist, who braved the Abolitionist and Woman’s Rights Movements.

Melba Joyce Boyd was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bremen, and a Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. She has held academic positions at the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan—Flint. She has a Doctor of Arts in English from the University of Michigan, and M.A. and B.A. degrees in English from Western Michigan University.

 

 

 

02 May 2023

 

Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico and Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin)

"May Ayim's 'Wake Work'"

 

6.30 – 8.00 P.M. (CET)
DOR 24, 1501

 

This paper argues that Black German activist-intellectual May Ayim pursued what cultural theorist Christina Sharpe calls “wake work” through her many creative endeavors. For Sharpe, wake work offers “a theory and a praxis of Black being in the diaspora” (Sharpe, In the Wake 19). In this way, wake work serves as an act resistance that recognizes the on-going valences of colonialism and enslavement in the present. With Ayim’s wake work, she carved out and created empowering spaces for the Black community, especially in a German context that labeled them as nonhuman and relegated them to the margins. Her work within and outside of the modern Black German movement represented her efforts to persist regardless of the imposed paradoxes of her diasporic identity, rights, and citizenship. Ayim’s wake work recognized the losses and silences while also celebrating new possibilities. Indeed, her practices of wake work shed light on Black life in the shadows of anti-Blackness in Germany.

 

BIO: Tiffany N. Florvil is currently the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (AAB) for the spring semester 2023. She is also an Associate Professor of 20^th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. Florvil specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African/Black diaspora, social movements, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, APuZ, and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories, as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History and To Turn this Whole World Over. The German translation, Black Germany-Schwarz, deutsch, feministisch-die Geschichte einer Bewegung, was published with Ch. Links Verlag in April 2023, and Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, was published with the University of Illinois Press in 2020. The book received the Waterloo Centre for German Studies (WCGS) First Book Prize. She sits on the Advisory Board and Editorial Board for several organizations and journals, including the Journal of Women’s History and the Central European History journal. She is also an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press.

 

 

20 June 2023

 

David Diallo (Université de Bordeaux):

"How Rap Became 'Black': Examining Hip Hop's Foundational Years"

 

6.30 – 8.00 P.M. (CET)
DOR 24, 1501

 

In this lecture, David Diallo will analyze the development of rap music from an expressive form produced by and for the Bronx youth to a marker of racial identity. He will first examine the inception of rap in a specific and demographically heterogeneous socio-geographical territory - the Bronx of the 1970s with its black and Puerto Rican population - before highlighting its discursive transition to "black music."

 

BIO: David Diallo is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bordeaux, France. His research interests focus on African-American history and expressive forms. In 2019, he published Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music (Palgrave).

 

 

 

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