AA&AS chair's blog

The documentary Trouble the Water "opens the day before Katrina makes landfall, just blocks away from the French Quarter but far from the New Orleans that tourists know. Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. 'It's going to be a day to remember,' Kim says excitedly into her new camera as the storm is brewing. It's her first time shooting video and it's rough, jumpy, but dense with reality. Kim's playful home-grown newscast tone grinds against the audience's knowledge that hell is just hours away. There is no way for the audience to warn her. And for New Orleans' poor, there is nowhere to run."

"As the hurricane begins to rage and the floodwaters fill their world and the screen, Kim and her husband Scott continue to film, documenting their harrowing voyage to higher ground and dramatic rescues of friends and neighbors."

Trouble the Water is now playing at Minneapolis' Lagoon Cinema.

Posted by Walt Jacobs at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

France Noire &mdash Black France: The Poetics and Politics of Blackness
June 6-7, 2008 &mdash Paris, France
http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Stovall/conference/

Colloquium Mission
The last few years have seen an extraordinary flowering of Black consciousness in France. Individuals and collectives have organized around questions pertaining to the memory of slavery, "race" and anti-Black racism, the Black condition, and what it generally means to be Black in contemporary French society. At the same time, there has been a new wave of scholarship on Blacks in Europe and a (re)theorizing of "blackness" in the African diaspora relative to European society and history. Paris, in particular, has always been a center of Black life worldwide, from the Negritude movement of the past to the myriad formations of Black empowerment specific to this moment. On June 6 and 7, 2008, a gathering of leading international scholars will meet in Paris to examine "Black France," that is, the Black presence and condition in French society. Madame Christiane Taubira, the esteemed member of the French Parliament whose very name is now synonymous with legislation that recognizes slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity &mdash The Taubira Law &mdash will deliver the keynote address as the prelude to an exciting and stimulating series of discussions. All who are interested in the African diaspora and French society are encouraged to attend what will be an historic event.

Posted by Walt Jacobs at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)