Seminar VI: The Fierce urgency of Now

Seminar VI: The Fierce urgency of Now In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the “fierce urgency of now” he warned that “there is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” Session VI brings together scholars whose academic and advocacy work has been shaped by present-day crises such as the counterrevolution in Sudan, the genocide in Palestine, and the fascist censorship of those who speak on either. Each keynote lectures thinks through how the Africana Muslim’s longue durée under surveillance, exile, occupation, and threat intensifies the urgency of the now.

Kayla Renèe Wheeler (Xavier University) and Zaheer Ali (Hutchins Institute for Social Justice)

This two-part session will explore plantations as a site constructive of the economic, political, social, and affective orders that define modernity. What happens to this site and the modernity it represents when we examine it as a space in which the Muslim, the African, and the Africana Muslim were racialized and resisted that racialization by imagining worlds otherwise?

Cemil Aydin (Professor of Global history, Department of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Dahlia E.M. Gubara (Assistant Professor of History, Koç University), Atiya Husain (Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College), Aliyah Khan (Associate Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan), Gabriel Salgado (Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Trinity College), Tāhir Fuzile Sitoto (Lecturer, School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal), Délice Mugabo (Assistant Professor, Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa), and Cord J. Whitaker (Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, Wellesley)

Watch the entire lecture series on YouTube

Keynote Speaker, Seminar VI: The Pan-Africanism of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse

Momodou Taal is a UK law graduate from the University of East Anglia. After obtaining his LLB, Momodou travelled to Cairo to study at Al-Azhar Mosque where he received a license in Islamic law and Arabic. Momodou is currently in the third year of his PhD at Cornell University in the Africana Department. His research focuses on conceptualisations of sovereignty, with a particular focus on West Africa. Momodou is the host of a popular podcast, The Malcolm Effect, dedicated to political education. He also organizes for Palestinian liberation which resulted in his targeting by the US state this year.

Keynote Speaker, Seminar VI: The Historical Construction of the African Community in Jerusalem

Yasser Qous is a postgraduate student pursuing a master's in the Department of History and Civilization at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Paris. His research interests are social history in Palestine (focusing on the historical construction of the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem). Yasser was born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem as a son of the African Community. In 2006, with a group of friends, he revived the African Community Center in the Old City after it had been shut down for several years during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Yasser is a Palestinian community leader in the Old City whose organizational skills and guiding values inspire others to follow in his footsteps.

Panelist, Seminar VI: The Politics of Hunger in Sudan

Nisrin Elamin is an Assistant Professor of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her writing and media commentary on Sudan and US immigration policy has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Hammer and Hope, Journal of Critical African Studies, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now and CBC. She is also member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective based in Canada which provides material support to civilian-led mutual aid networks and unions at the forefront of relief efforts in Sudan. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Stratified Enclosures: Land, Gulf Capital and Empire-making in Central Sudan.