Monthly Talks Offer Opportunities to Connect, Learn, and Engage
In celebration of the 55th anniversary of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), the department is hosting monthly Faculty Forums in the DAAS conference room (Haven Hall 4701). Held on Wednesdays at 12 p.m., these talks give students, faculty, and community members an opportunity to hear directly from DAAS professors about their current research, creative projects, and intellectual pursuits.
“The DAAS Faculty Forum Series has been an amazing initiative this year, offering an invaluable opportunity to take the pulse of the department's intellectual life,” said Bénédicte Boisseron, DAAS professor and department chair. “It has revealed the true goldmine of ideas that exists right here within DAAS. In the midst of demanding teaching schedules, ongoing research, and national and international commitments, the forum has allowed us to reconnect with one another’s work and fully appreciate the vibrancy of our collective work.”
Associate Professor Stephen Ward: “Free Your Mind and DAAS Will Follow”
Associate Professor Stephen Ward opened the series on September 17 with “Free Your Mind and DAAS Will Follow,” a talk that explored the department’s origins within the political and cultural fermentation of the late 1960s. Ward’s talk kicked off with the 1970 Funkadelic track “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow,” released the same year as DAAS’ founding, as a metaphor for radical imagination and liberation. Its electric demand to “break the chains” reflected in the spirit of a generation determined to create new intellectual and institutional spaces for Black thought.
Ward traced the beginnings of DAAS to the mid-1960s, when historian Richard Ross introduced a Black history course despite pushback from his department. Debates over nomenclature such as “Negro history” vs. “Black history” echoed broader ideological struggles around identity, language, and self-determination. Of course, these campus developments were unfolding alongside the rise of Black Power, building on the Civil Rights Movement while centering consciousness, self-determination, political independence, and global solidarity with anti-colonial movements. Ward situated DAAS within that wave of activism, highlighting teach-ins at Angell Hall, Vietnam War protests, uprisings, and the creation of Black studies programs at institutions across the country. Black studies, Ward emphasized, was never just an academic project, but a political one rooted in struggle, critique, and community building.
Professor Magdalena Zaborowska: “James Baldwin’s Black Queer Humanism as a Track and Tune on His Life Album”
On October 22, Professor and Department of American Culture Chair Magdalena Zaborowska presented “James Baldwin’s Black Queer Humanism as a Track and Tune on His Life Album,” drawing from more than two decades of archival research to examine Baldwin’s expansive, intersectional vision of humanity. Having just published her third book on Baldwin, Zaborowska described the painstaking processes of hand-copying letters, interpreting early manuscripts, and gathering interviews that shaped her understanding of the author’s life and artistic evolution. Central to Zaborowska’s reading is Baldwin’s insistence on “showing, not describing” — an approach rooted in his belief that literature emerges from lived experiences rather than abstract theory.
Zaborowska traced Baldwin’s earliest influences to the women who raised him, especially his mother, whose resilience and tenderness shaped his ideas about care, home, and storytelling. Themes of belonging and exile followed him into adulthood, including his self-fashioning years in Turkey and France, where he found space to write beyond America’s racial constraints.
Baldwin’s reflections on identity — particularly his sense of multiple selves — anchor what Zaborowska defines as the author’s “Black Queer Humanism”: a framework incorporating race, queerness, class, and feminist thought. Zaborowska also highlighted Baldwin’s artistic influences. These included painter Beauford Delaney, Baldwin’s “spiritual father,” who provided artistic guidance and affirmed Baldwin’s queerness, creativity, and intellect. Ultimately, Zaborowska positioned Baldwin as foundational to Black queer and trans rhetoric studies, emphasizing his belief that true humanity requires embracing the woman within the man.
Assistant Professor Jessica Walker: “Styling the Soul Food Imaginary”
On November 5, Assistant Professor Jessica Walker delivered her talk, “Styling the Soul Food Imaginary,” exploring how soul food has been visually constructed, culturally interpreted, and politically contested. Walker examined how historical and cultural forces shape how soul food — and Black women who’ve cooked it — are represented, consumed, and understood.
Walker opened with the idea that most of the food imagery we encounter is carefully staged. Corporate branding campaigns and shows like America's Test Kitchen influence public assumptions about what “authentic” food looks like. Walker also spoke about efforts to reclaim African and African diasporic food traditions, drawing from LaKela Brown’s exhibit “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment” to emphasize how such culinary practices have been overshadowed or distorted. She identified some key myths within the “soul food imaginary”: the notions that all Black women learned to cook from the same plantation traditions; that soul food remained unchanged through the Great Migration; that Black women cook effortlessly and alone; and that soul food is inherently unhealthy. Walker demonstrated how Black women have negotiated and challenged these narratives through labor and creativity, disrupting boundaries between urban and rural spaces, taste and respectability, and tradition and modernity.
Through pop culture examples like Aunt Jemima and The Beulah Show, Walker traced how domesticity and womanhood have been shaped and policed. Three case studies — Freda DeKnight’s modernized culinary pedagogy, Jonell Nash’s health-conscious “low-fat soul” and Ghetto Gastro’s radical reimagining of the Black kitchen — were used to illustrate how Black culinary artists across generations have reshaped and reclaimed the meaning of “soul food.”
Professor Alford Young Jr.: “Who Speaks for African Americans?: Harold Cruse, Black Scholars, and the Politics of Representations”
In his December 5 Faculty Forum, “Who Speaks for African Americans?: Harold Cruse, Black Scholars, and the Politics of Representations,” Professor Al Young explored the longstanding question of how Black intellectuals understand their role in speaking about and for the Black community. Young opened by acknowledging that his research was necessarily incomplete, emphasizing that his analysis focused on a “subset of a subset” of Black scholars and therefore cannot encompass the full diversity of Black intellectual life. Even so, he argued, the tensions that emerge within this limited sample reveal much about the broader politics of scholarly voice and representation.
Drawing on former DAAS Department Chair Harold Cruse’s foundational critique, Young highlighted the challenges inherent in claiming to represent Black America. Cruse warned that scholars often treat Black communities as objects of study rather than constituencies to whom they are accountable. He insisted that Black intellectuals justify “what you’re speaking for,” pushing them to clarify their responsibilities, their aims, and the price of their work. Young elaborated on this by outlining a typology of Black scholarly roles — the Critic, the Advocate, and the Translator — each of which balances different forms of accountability, critique, and accessibility.
The Critic engages with the Black community with uncompromising honesty, refusing to suppress uncomfortable truths for the sake of racial solidarity. The Advocate seeks to uplift the community while avoiding simplification, offering an informed perspective with humility rather than assuming that expertise automatically grants authority. Lastly, the Translator makes scholarship accessible and resonant beyond academia, ensuring that research reflects and speaks meaningfully to the lived experiences of the community. These “roles” highlight the ways in which scholars navigate the community-academy divide, particularly amid historical distrust between Black communities and Black academics.
Young further illustrated these tensions through discussions of the Parvenu and the Celebrity Scholar, figures who may become public voices for experiences they have not lived, raising difficult questions about legitimacy and authority. He returned to W.E.B. Du Bois’ moment of reckoning upon seeing the severed knuckles of a lynched Black man, a visceral reminder of the gap between academic study and lived Black suffering. For Young, these examples reveal the profound ethical stakes embedded in African American intellectual life: Scholars must continually evaluate how their positionality shapes their ability to speak, whom they speak for, and whether their work materially serves the community whose struggles they seek to represent.
Across the fall 2025 semester of Faculty Forums, a shared theme emerges.
Black cultural expression is continually reshaped through resistance, imagination, and reclamation. Taken together, the talks demonstrate that Black futures are forged through ongoing acts of reinvention, cultural stewardship, and the determination to define oneself beyond the boundaries set by dominant institutions.
Head to the DAAS conference room monthly on Wednesdays at noon to hear DAAS faculty talk about their passions! View the full speaker schedule here.
