Thursday, March 10, 2022

Presented by the UT Humanities Center

Today sociologists, political scientists, artists, and humanists are examining how rivers and waterways are conduits of social values and political power, as they carry life-sustaining water but also historical memory—as well as industrial pollution, often to poor communities of color. Black epistemologies, Black aesthetics, and Black diaspora studies are exploring the historical, material, metaphorical, and theoretical potentiality of waterways—from tidalectics to liquid blackness, in critical fabulation and speculative diasporic return. Intersectional studies examine how Black ecologies centered in environmental justice intersect and dialogue with Indigenous epistemologies and other theoretical discourses. In these rich and evolving discussions, rivers and waterways emerge as more than material things, but something other than “mythic”: they become a meeting ground for imaginative reconceptualizations of self, community, history, and world.

“Just Environments: Rivers and Waterways” is a one-day symposium that brings together artists and scholars from different fields for a conversation about rivers and waterways through a lens of Black Ecologies. All of the talks will be free and open to the public via webinar; the links are below. In conjunction with this symposium, there will be film screenings of River Lines by Natalie Diaz and Saretta Morgan and a series of film shorts, times to be announced.

Schedule

Thursday, March 10, 2022

9:00 am Session 1 Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced “Buried Beneath the Sea: Life and Death in the Slave Ship’s Wake”

11:00 am Session 2 J.T. Roane, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, Arizona State University “Black Ecologies, Subaquatic Life, and the Jim Crow Enclosure of the Tidewater”

1:00 pm Session 3 Cornelius Eady, Interim Director of Poets House and the Chair of Excellence in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville “A Reading of Poetry”

3:00 pm Natalie Diaz, Director, Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Arizona State University and Saretta Morgan, Poet and Artist, Creative Writing instructor, Arizona State University “A Talk with Natalie Diaz and Saretta Morgan”

A symposium hosted by the UT Humanities Center during “Black Ecologies Week” at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Featured Speakers

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  Kevin Dawson is an associate professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced and is the author of several award-winning articles. His book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) received the Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC. The award recognizes the best U.S.-published, nonfiction book on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World.

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  J.T. Roane is an assistant professor at Rutgers University whose research interests include Black geographies, Black ecologies, Black Gender and Sexuality Studies, urban and rural geographies, African American and African Diaspora History, and political ecology.

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  Cornelius Eady is an American writer focusing largely on matters of race and society. His poetry often centers on jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. His poetry is often praised for its simple and approachable language.

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  Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O’odham. She is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University.