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/

"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.

Postcolonial discourse has called into question the historic Western Enlightenment by demonstrating its links to violent colonialism, chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and persistent institutional and cultural racism.

Sir Hilary Beckles suggests that the growing global reparatory justice movement—particularly as it emanates from the higher education sector—may present the best potential for an authentic 21st-century Enlightenment. Universities are now deeply researching their role, functions, and legacies within the Atlantic slave complex and exploring where these discursive discoveries, as crimes against humanity, will lead—back into the future or forward against the past.

Join the lecture live in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall! In-person attendees have the chance to enchange ideas with Beckles during a Q&A session following the lecture. Or join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

About the Speaker

Sir Hilary Beckles, eighth vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, is a distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official, and global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment.

He received his higher education in the United Kingdom and is professor of economic history. He has lectured extensively in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He has published over 100 peer reviewed essays in scholarly journals and over 13 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History, to gender relations in the Caribbean, sport development, and popular culture.

Beckles is president of Universities Caribbean, chair of the Caribbean Examinations Council, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and advisor on sustainable development to former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. He was knighted by the government of Barbados. He has received numerous honorary doctorates from around the world and recently received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace and Freedom Award.

Hosts and Sponsors

Beckles' lecture and campus visit are part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' Distinguished Speaker series and ongoing work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice. The lecture is the closing event in the 60th anniversary Public Issues Forum series of the Einaudi Center's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

The event is funded in part by the A.D. White Professor-At-Large Program, the Migrations initiative, and a LACS Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), and Cornell's Language Resource Center.

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. And yet, under current U.S. law, there is no such thing as a climate refugee.

To address today’s realities, U.S. migration policies need to change, argues María Cristina García in a live Chats in the Stacks talk about her book State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022). The book offers a critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, with a focus on Central America and the Caribbean, where natural disasters worsen poverty, inequality, and domestic and international political tensions.

García is the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, where her work focuses on the history of displaced and mobile populations in the Americas. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. She is a recipient of a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the 2010 Cornell Stephen and Margery Russell Teaching Award, and the 2016 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award.

This book talk is sponsored by Olin Library. Light refreshments will be served.

For decades now, efforts to understand Venezuela’s mutating crises have often reflected rather than risen above the same polarization that has turned the country’s politics into a winner-take-all conflict between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. In turn, polarized accounts have often rested on incomplete pictures of Hugo Chávez and Chavismo aimed less at explaining than at apportioning or deflecting blame. Is a different account possible? What might a history of Chavismo that stresses contingency and contradiction over telos and consistency look like? This presentation offers a sweeping account of Chávez and Chavismo that emphasizes the evolving nature of both. Seen as a whole, Chavismo takes shape less as a single movement linked by an overriding ideology than as an assemblage of often contradictory movements and ideologies that developed in distinct stages. Though each stage created and responded to new challenges and opportunities, all were and remain thread together by the changing whims of its charismatic, polarizing leader, in life and long after his death.

Alejandro Velasco is a historian at New York University's Gallatin School and Department of History, and was Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas from 2015 to 2021. Velasco's first book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015), won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for best book on Venezuela, awarded biennially by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Current History, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CBS, France 24, the BBC, and the CBC.