As part of the program Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education – A Week with Angela Davis

 Scholar and organizer Gina Dent will give a masterclass at the University of Amsterdam called The Idea of Africa (May 16). Besides a masterclass, she will present from her forthcoming book Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology (Duke University Press) in a lecture at the Black Archives (May 16) and participate in the Public Dialogue: Radical Solidarity and Intergenerational Coalitions at the Tropenmuseum (May 13). The masterclass, lecture, and public dialogue are part of the weeklong program Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education – A Week with Angela Davis.

Gina Dent is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She obtained a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She previously served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research and as Principal Investigator for the University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998) and publishes on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art. Her current projects, Prison as a Border and Other Essays and Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology, grow out of her work as an advocate and researcher on human rights, prison abolition, black popular culture, globalization, and social justice. She has offered courses in critical race studies and black feminisms in Brazil (Universidade Federal da Bahia and Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia), Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Sweden (Linköping University) and lectures widely on these and other subjects. In June 2011, she was a member of a delegation of indigenous and women of color feminists to Palestine.

Open to: MA and RMA students, PhD students, faculty, and people with reading experience in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, African American Studies, Feminist Theory and/or Africana Studies. There are 5 spots for BA students with demonstrable interest in the topic.

Credits: MA and RMA students can acquire 1 EC if they attend both the lecture and masterclass and complete all the preparatory readings.

Requirements: Participants are required to read and prepare all the readings before coming to the masterclass. The readings will be distributed about two weeks before the masterclass.

Registration: nica-fgw@uva.nl, BA students are requested to write a short motivation.