USA Africa Dialogue Series - Dean Paul Zeleza: Launching of In Search of African Diasporas In Text and Photographs

March 24, 2012: Book Launch Program:   In Search of African Diaspora: Testimonies and Encounters

By Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

PHOTOGRAPHS:

The context of campus, city, and venue

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toyinfalola/sets/72157629668040989/

as slide show

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toyinfalola/sets/72157629668040989/show/

STATEMENT:

Do please find below an abridged statement that I made at the launching, the program of events.

My statement

....The book is part of a distinguished series on a new body of works on "the strategic place of Africa and its diaspora in shifting global world." Professors Paul Zeleza's book fulfills the objectives of the series by Carolina Academic Press...

Reading it in the manuscript form and various stages of the production process, I can see that a lot of work went into writing it. The data collection is both unique and extraordinary, covering many countries, and documenting the lives of Black people in different places.

The tropes include conditions, existentiality, experiences, fears and hopes, voices, and agencies. Faces, places and names reveal a lot, and they become signifiers of the politics of location, interactions, and hierarchies.

Time does not permit me to elaborate on the significance of this major book. May I be permitted to make just these points:

a)      a new way of writing, a new methodology, new questions, new answers on the diaspora;

b)      we know very  much about citizenship, politics, economy, justice and rights in different countries and continents; and

c)      It is an outstanding text for now, a primary document for this era in history, and a text for the future. Indeed, in many years to come, it will become one of the definite primary texts for this moment... 

PROGRAM

The Marriot Courtyard Westside
6333 Bristol Parkway, Culver City, Carlifornia 90230 USA

Book Launch Program

Program
4:00-5:00        Cocktails

5:00-5:05      Introductions: Cassandra Rachel Veney, Associate Professor of Political Science, LMU

5:00-5:25   Commentaries on the Book
Edmond Keller, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, UCLA
Jan Nederveen pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology in the Global & International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Cheryl Grills, Professor of psychology and Associate dean, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, LMU
Toyin Falola, Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor
in history at the University of Texas at Austin

5:25- 5:35      Commentary and reading by Book Author

5:00-6:00  Book Signing

6:00-7:00   Cocktails  

--  

Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue