WGS MLK pre-doctoral fellow Nneka Dennie presents "From Abolition to Suffrage: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Feminist Nationalism".

From Abolition to Suffrage: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Feminist Nationalism" examines the work of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an African American activist. It argues that Shadd Cary consistently navigated the tensions between black nationalism, on one hand, and the politics of respectability, on the other. To conclude, "From Abolition to Suffrage" explores how Shadd Cary's work offers a paradigm for interpreting nineteenth-century black feminist thought.

Anthropology MLK pre-doctoral fellow Kera Street presents “Everyday Purity: Black Evangelical Women and Living Right in a Digital Age"

From the turn of the century up to the present, evangelical Christians have given theological and cultural primacy to purity and sexuality, often linking larger issues in the religious, social, and political world to notions of a correct or deviant sexual subject. This talk examines how evangelical concerns for purity continue to surface in the contemporary moment—one marked increasing by new media and digital technologies. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork with an evangelical women’s group called Pinky Promise, it considers the ways new media factors into pursuits of purity for born-again black Christian women, creating new sites to interrogate lived experience and religious practice. It provides an example of how religiosity, religious identity, and religious community take shape in a mediated world, and paints a portrait of what lived religion looks like in a digital age.   

Wednesday, April 4th 2018
E51-275