Stanford Report, February 1, 2006

Weekly lecture series focuses on politics, culture of Harlem

Harlem is a metaphor and a state of mind, the scene of "blood, destruction, pain, poverty, joy and creativity," said Arnold Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a leading expert on the Harlem Renaissance, at a campus talk Friday. "When you walk through Harlem, you walk through sacred ground," he said.

Rampersad's remarks came during the second lecture in a weekly winter lecture series, "Black Metropolis: Post-Katrina Politics and Urban Culture," organized around the culture, history and politics of Harlem. The Friday lecture series is sponsored by the African and African American Studies Program and offered both as a weekly intellectual gathering and as an undergraduate class preparing students for a spring break trip to Harlem, said program Director Larry Bobo, professor of sociology. The series is free and open to the public.

The lectures are scheduled from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Hartley Conference Center in the Mitchell Earth Sciences Building, with the exception of March 3, when the lecture will be held at Pigott Theater.

Lecturers and the titles of the talks for the remainder of the quarter include:

  • Feb. 3: Karen M. Kaufmann, assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, "Still Waiting for the Rainbow Coalition? Mass Anxieties, Group Rationality and the Future of Urban Politics"
  • Feb. 10: Martha Biondi, assistant professor in the departments of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University, "How Does New York Change the Story of the Civil Rights Movement?"
  • Feb. 17: Michele Elam, associate professor of English at Stanford, "The Politics of Art in the Harlem Renaissance"
  • March 3: Visiting artist Marcus Shelby, composer, bassist and founder of Noir Records, "Bound for the Promised Land"
  • March 10: Coleman A. Jordan, assistant professor of architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, "The Mouthpiece of Harlem: Claiming Political Space in Public Life"
  • March 17: John L. Jackson Jr., assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, "Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity"

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