Artist Laylah Ali was born and raised in Buffalo, NY. She earned an MFA from Washington University in 1994, with additional residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions of her drawings include Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and the group show, "Freestyle," at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She is represented by 303 gallery in New York.
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Tisa Bryant (MFA, '04) lived and worked for several years in San Francisco, where she curated New Langton Arts' literary arts program, and conducted writing workshops in elementary schools, colleges and prisons. In addition to her essays for gallery shows for artist Laylah Ali, Ms. Bryant's writings has recently appeared in Bombay Gin, Cross Cultural Poetics, Curve, Mosaic, and in the anthologies Beyond the Frontier (Black Classics Press, 2002), Hatred of Capitalism (semiotext(e), 2002), Long Journey Home (The Women's Press, UK, 2002), Short Fuse: A Global Anthology of the New Fusion Poetry (Rattapallax Press, 2002) and Step Into a World (John Wiley & Sons, 2001). Her chapbook, Tzimmes, was published by A+Bend Press in 2000.
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José Ignacio Fusté ('01) studied anthropology as an undergraduate. He is currently the Research Coordinator at Brown University's Institute for Elementary and Secondary Education. This fall, he will begin doctoral studies on the history of colonial racialization and deculturation in the Latin Caribbean and its influence on current power dynamics in the region.
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Michael Hames-Garcia is Assistant Professor of English and of Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He has a book forthcoming on prison intellectuals and legal theory, Crucibles of Freedom: Justice, Critical Race Theory, and Prison Praxis (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). In addition, he is co-editor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Redefining Identity Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). He also teaches courses and has written articles on gay and lesbian studies, critical race theory, and U.S. Latina/o literatures. Currently, he is on leave and enjoying a visiting fellowship at Stanford University's research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.
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Joy James, Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, teaches political and feminist theory. She is the author of Resisting State Violence, Transcending the Talented Tenth and Shadowboxing. Her edited works on incarceration politics include: States of Confinement: Policing, Detention and Prisons; Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation and Rebellion, and the forthcoming Abolitionists: Incarceration, Enslavement, and Emancipation. Currently she works with the Tubman Literary Circle.
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Joseph F. Jordan is associate professor in the African/Afro-American Studies Department and director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His recent work includes curating the Without Sanctuary exhibit of lynching photographs and "memorabilia" at the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, an event that drew over 160,000 visitors.
For many years, Jordan has worked to create lasting partnerships between universities and grassroots/community organizations on a variety of cultural and social justice initiatives. His work includes international solidarity projects in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. He is the founder of the Antioch-Cape Verde Study Abroad Project. He is currently a board member of the Grassroots Leadership Institute, the Carolina Center for Public Service, the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the Contemporary Arts Centre of Kingston, Jamaica.
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Somewhat reliable dispatches from bribed officials on the West Coast suggest that William Anthony Nericcio (aka "Memo") is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Other nosy operatives have confirmed that he openly consorts there in various academic fields including Cultural Studies, "American" Literature, Post-Structuralist Theory, Chicana/Chicano Discourse, Film Studies, and Latin American Literature. Nericcio held postings at the University of Connecticut, his first and arguably most infamous gig, and at Cornell University, where he completed his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature (1989) with a dissertation entitled, "The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas."
Nericcio's most recent publications include an essay on Rita Hayworth's battle with electrolysis in Violence and the Body (Indiana University Press), and on Frida Kahlo's and Gilbert Hernandez's symbiotic symmetry in Latino Popular Culture (New York University Press). His edited anthology, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation will appear later this year with Hyperbole Books.
For more, see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/press/bioblurb.html
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T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of French and Africana Studies and Chair of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. She received the Ph.D. in 1994 from Brown University. Her publications include Negritude Women (Minnesota, 2002); Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French (Duke, 1999); Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). She is co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader (Blackwell, 2000); Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures and Revolutions (Roman & Littlefield, 1997), which received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America; and Fanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1996). She is currently Chair of the Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures, a committee of the Modern Language Association.
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Dylan Rodriguez is an activist currently employed as an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of CA, Riverside. He is a founding member of the organizing committee for the national prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex. He is involved in a range of political work, and recently collaborated with the national organization INCITE!: Women of Color against Violence. He obtained his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of CA, Berkeley, in 2001.
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Nyla Rosen ('03) is a graduating senior in Ethnic Studies, with a focus on racialization, incarceration and movements of resistance; her work emphasizes coalition building among social justice/independence movements in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in the United States.
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Born in New York in 1955, Susan Rosenberg became involved with anti-racist activism as a high school student in the early 1970s, organizing support for the Black liberation and Puerto Rican independence struggles; she was also involved with the student, anti-war, and women's movements. As a result of her support for the Black Liberation Army (BLA), and becoming a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rosenberg went underground in the early 1980s, and was arrested in 1984 on weapons possession charges. When convicted and sentenced to fifty-eight years, sixteen times the national average for such an offense, the judge cited her political ideology as the reason for his decision. Rosenberg had been previously charged in the 1981 Brinks Robbery case in New York and was accused of being a participant in the escape of BLA leader Assata Shakur from prison, but these charges against her were dismissed for lack of evidence. In 1988, she was charged in the "Resistance Conspiracy" case, but these charges were also eventually dropped. Despite more than a decade incarcerated in isolation and maximum security, she continued to organize, teach, and write; she also served as an HIV/AIDS peer educator. Her writings have appeared in Criminal Injustice and Doing Time Twenty Five Years of Prison Writing. Susan Rosenberg obtained her masters degree in writing in 2000. Granted clemency by President Clinton in 2001, she currently works as a human rights and prisoner rights activist, is writing a memoir, and teaching literature at John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York City.
(For divergent discussion on the Brinks tragedy and loss of life see Imprisoned Intellectuals, ed. Joy James, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, and The Big Dance, John Castellucci, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986)
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Hana Tauber ('03.5) is a senior in Ethnic Studies. Her focus is the prison industrial complex, specifically the incarceration of political prisoners in the United States and methods of community organizing for social justice.
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Imagination, Imaging & Memory: Racial, Gender & Political Violence
image_imagination_memory@brown.edu or Tisa Bryant/Joy James, Department of Africana Studies, Brown University
This conference is supported by
The Department of Africana Studies, Hewlett Faculty Fellows and Professor Joy James