Guest Lecture by Prof. Travis Harris (Norfolk State University)

Thursday, November 30, 2023, 6 p.m., Philosphikum, S93

This talk will draw out the parallels between minority groups in the US and Germany with a particular focus on those who are Hip Hop. Bringing together performance studies with Hip Hop studies, I will analyze the ways in which disenfranchised peoples perform Hip Hop identities. This particular Hip Hop identity performed is informed by the idea of Hip Hop being a collective consciousness that comes out of a sacrifice. This Hip Hop identity is not one that the Hip Hoppa puts on and takes off, they are Hip Hop all the time. Therefore, this notion of "performance" is not a stage performance, rather, it is how minorities live in the private and public spheres that enables them to resist oppressive forces.

Travis Harris, Ph.D., is the Director of Black Revolutionary Education for the International Black Freedom Alliance, Visiting Assistant Professor at Norfolk State University and the Editor in Chief for the Journal of Hip Hop Studies. He is actively involved in the Black liberation movement and does not separate his freedom work from his academic work. His primary goal is for all Black people to get free. He has a plethora of experience in the freedom struggle, from getting Black people out of jail to protesting on the front lines to writing policy in order to make systemic change. His research examines the multiple dimensions of African diasporas with a specific focus on race, religion and Hip Hop. As an interdisciplinary freedom fighting scholar, he analyzes the complexities of Black life.

Registration: american-studies[at]uni-koeln.de

Guest Lecture by Prof. Jeffrey Allan Tucker (University of Rochester)

Wednesday, December 20, 2023, 6 p.m., via Zoom

Using the scholarship of Donald Keesey as a starting point, this presentation identifies a handful of fundamental approaches to literary criticism and applies each of them to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin the Sun (1959) with the goal of generating ideas that will be of use to students as they develop their own interpretations of the play.

Jeffrey Allen Tucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Departments of English and Black Studies. Prof. Tucker obtained his PhD at Princeton University and has studied literature as a context for discussions about postmodernism, cultural and identity politics, and racial representation. Much of his research has addressed the genre of science fiction. He is the author of A Sense of Wonder:  Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference (2004), editor of Conversations with John A. Williams (2018), co-editor of Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century (1997), and author of scholarly articles on writers such as Colson Whitehead, Octavia E. Butler, and George S. Schuyler.

Registration: american-studies[at]uni-koeln.de