A LACS Public Issues Forum in collaboration with the African Diaspora Knowledge Exchange Project

Two cases have become emblematic for understanding the intensification of racism and sexism in Brazilian society during the pandemic that killed more than 650,000 Brazilians and since the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil. The first death recorded in Brazil by Covid-19 was a black woman, 63 years old, a domestic worker, contaminated by her employer; the second was the death of 5-year-old Miguel Otávio when he fell from the 5th floor of the building where his mother worked. Throughout this period, black women's movements carried out various face-to-face activities. They acted strongly through social networks, conducting campaigns to collect resources, clothes, and food and denouncing the violence and the neglect of President Bolsonaro's government concerning public policies to combat the pandemic. They participated in the political campaign of black women in the 2020 elections, such as the Marielle Franco Forum, ENEGRECER a Política, Black Women Decide, Eu Voto em Negra. This presentation considers the political setback and loss of rights in recent years and addresses the Brazilian socio-political context and the political response of black feminist organizations. I focus mainly on processes of knowledge production, institutional political dispute, and the confrontation of political gender violence. The data presented result from effective participation as an activist and researcher and the analysis of social media cards, lives, seminars, and webinars produced in the last two years.

Ângela Figueiredo, PhD. is a professor in the Social Sciences Department of the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia in Cachoeira-Bahia, Brazil (CAHL – UFRB); an associate of the Graduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies (POSAFRO) and the Postgraduate Program in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (PPGNEIM) at the Federal University of Bahia. Dr. Figueiredo is also the coordinator of the research and activist group Collective Angela Davis. Dr. Figueiredo has produced two documentaries - Ebony Goddess (Deusa do Ébano, 2004) e Dialogues with the Secret (Diálogos com o Sagrado, 2013) and curated the Global African Hair exhibition that took place in Salvador, Bahia. She has published the following books: New Black Elites (Novas elites de cor, 2002), Black Middle Class (Classe média negra, 2012), Black Beauty (Beleza Negra, (2016). She has also written several articles on Black Feminism in Brazil, including "Decolonial Black Feminist Epistemology" (2021) and "Letter to Judith Butler from an ex-mulatto woman" (2016).

This LACS Public Issues Forum event was organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) as part of Celebrating it's 60th Anniversary (1961-2021) in collaboration with the African Diaspora Knowledge Exchange Project..

This event was made possible by the generous support of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Romance Studies Department, Africana Studies and Research Center, Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Anthropology Department.

Can't make it in person? Join us through eCornell, register at: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K110322/

Recovering and propagating family histories can be a strategy to identify and dismantle how U.S. immigration policies have institutionalized the racial exclusion of targeted groups, even as they mask the selective inclusion of legal immigrants. Madeline Y. Hsu will discuss the family history origins of her two monographs to explore intersections between the personal and the political and the possibilities of scholarship as an aspect of activism.

Madeline Y. Hsu is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas.

This lecture is a part of the Migrations Summer Pathways program.

Immigrants have set down roots and continue to arrive in local communities across the United States. If we want to know where immigrant families and residents are thriving (or falling behind), then quantitative analyses offer many opportunities to compare and contrast where immigrants make the most of local resources and networks (and where such opportunities remain stunted). Census, survey, administrative, and newly emerging data sources can hold important insights — if we have the tools to leverage such information in order to answer pressing social questions.

Juan Pedroza, assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz, will present this lecture on his work about the changing landscape of immigration in the United States. Over the past decade, he has examined the vast inequalities of immigrants' access to justice, the social safety net, poverty, and segregation. His research examines how and where deportation and enforcement initiatives exacerbate these inequalities and leave imprints in our local communities.

This lecture is a part of the Migrations Summer Pathways program.

For decades, numbers and narratives about ethnoracial demographic change have flooded U.S. public life. Yet, to date, scholarly attention has been more concerned with the sources and consequences of projected trends than with the political struggles and meaning-making processes through we have come to envision and sense demographic change in the first place.

Drawing on his book, Figures of the Futures: Latino Civil Rights and Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz will explore the racialized population politics of national Latino civil rights organizations. Specifically, it shows how Latino advocates have worked—and struggled—to render the “Latino demographic” and its growth politically potent and socially palatable. Along with insights into the contemporary state of Latino civil rights advocacy, the talk offers conceptual tools and methodological insights to challenge essentialist, deterministic, and depoliticized treatments of population dynamics.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching concerns the intersections of race, politics, and knowledge, with an emphasis on Latinx communities and movements.

This lecture is a part of the Migrations Summer Pathways program.

"Black Feminist Poetics and Language Teaching"
Luana Reis
Ph.D. Candidate and Portuguese Instructor, University of Pittsburgh

This talk discusses the inclusion of Black feminist poetic texts in language teaching. The objective is to rethink the roles of students and teachers in the classroom environment and contribute to inspiring new ideas and teaching practices. Black women's voices in poetry may promote the development of pedagogical proposals that encourage a critical reading of the world in educational practices.

Bio: Luana Reis is a poet, educator, and Black feminist scholar. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches Portuguese and conducts research on Contemporary Black Women Literature and Quilombismo/Maroonage. As founder and president of the poetry collective, "ADDverse+Poesia" (@addversepoesia), she brings writers and audiences together across the hemisphere, using the power of poetry for engaging a range of issues – particularly race and gender, freedom and refuge, and language and identity. She is a board member of Mulherio das Letras - USA chapter, a collective of researchers and creative writers whose goal is to unite the voices of women from the Lusophone world who live in the United States. She is also one of the coordinators of the "KilombaCollective," the first collective formed by Black Brazilian women in the United States.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Institute of African Development through their respective Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

Law scholars Bernadette Atuahene (Illinois Institute of Technology) and Mishuana Goeman (UCLA) will present this lecture at the annual Migrations summer institute. The talk highlights the institutes themes of dispossession and its ongoing effects in Africa and the Americas.

Bernadette Atuahene is a professor of law at the Chicago-Ken College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Mishuana Goeman is a University of Buffalo Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar. She is also a professor of gender studies, American Indian studies, and affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School at UCLA.

This event is part of the Migrations initiative's summer institute, co-sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Filmmaker Ginew Benton is a Native American filmmaker local to the Hamptons, NY. Benton wrote, starred, and directed in the 2018 film Looking Glass about a Native man who creates a time machine using modern science and ancient knowledge to stop his fathers murder and ultimately discovers his true purpose in creation.

As part of the Migrations initiative's summer institute, co-sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Benton will give a public lecture on transcending stereotypes of native films.