Annual Lecture and Performance Series
The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures ensures consistent intellectual and artistic engagement with issues of importance to Black lives and cultures. Lectures and discussions provided through the annual speaker series, book groups and co-sponsored film series allow students, faculty and staff to engage directly with emerging and prominent, cutting-edge thought leaders. The Griot Institute conducts research and hosts lectures that examine Black Lives and Cultures from Africa to its global Diasporas. The speakers in the series align with faculty led courses to enhance student learning with high impact learning experiences through critical dialogues.
Griot Spring Series 2026
Youth from Africa and the Diasporas: Knowers, Innovators, Visionaries and Everyday People
Youth from Africa and the Diasporas are knowers, innovators, visionaries, and everyday people, yet what opportunities are there in the twenty-first century for those coming of age in a world where pandemics and digital technologies are transforming the way we live our lives? African and Black Diaspora intellectuals such as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Claude Aké, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Buchi Emecheta, bell hooks, Marcus J. Moore, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and many others have provided deep insights into youth as creators of knowledge for new generations. In the words and actions of scholars and everyday people, it is clear that those coming of age struggle. Across eras it is hardly unique to struggle, and yet the challenges youth from Africa to the Diaspora are facing in the twenty-first century are particular. Through an examination of the visionary activism and knowledge production of youth in the past and present, this year's theme allows our community to contemplate the futures Black youth aspire to and deserve to realize. We will be able to raise questions about the obstacles and opportunities that lie ahead.
Recent Lecture and Performance Series Events
To access a Griot Spring Series video or audio recording you will be asked to log in with your Bucknell credentials. If you are interested in seeing a video, but do not have Bucknell credentials, please email griot@bucknell.edu with your request.
A decolonial approach does not confine itself to critiques of colonial epistemes and world order; it demands employing heterarchical approaches to knowledge.
The Griot Institute theme in 2024–25, Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning, centers the simultaneous yearning for and creation of decoloniality in Black intellectual, artistic, activist and educational traditions. Building on Toni Morrison's vision of a clearing, the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives & Cultures intends for this yearlong focus to create a clearing for the Bucknell community to grapple with how to create decolonial education and liberatory learning. In response to questions raised by students and as we cross over the 150-year mark of Black students studying at Bucknell, the aim is to foster conversations across campus about the legacies of colonialism, the erasures of non-European ways of thinking and doing, the persistent practices of anti-blackness, and how we might apply decolonial approaches in reclaiming alternative strategies in our lives. A decolonial approach offers alternative conceptualizations and examples of how to exist in the world, including how to interact with knowledge.
Hegemonic imposition of European colonial knowledge and colonial ways of being emerged with Atlantic expansion (1440–1600), settler colonialism (1492–present) and enslavement of Africans (1525–1888). Decolonial theory and strategies envision, draw upon and deploy thinking, institutions and language that existed before and beyond colonial theory and praxis. Pushing against post-colonial theorists, Claire Gallien (جالیان كلیر) contends that "the decolonial turn is not about augmenting and elevating Western episteme with new content. Rather … it clears a space for other epistemologies and cosmovisions to circulate in Western academia."
A decolonial approach does not confine itself to critiques of colonial epistemes and world order; it demands employing heterarchical approaches to knowledge. If decoloniality is a gesture that de-normalizes and problematizes normative epistemologies while bolstering formations that were repressed or erased under coloniality, how might we apply decoloniality in our practices of education and learning? Kihana Miraya Ross and Jarvis R. Givens provide a starting point. They echo Morrison's theory of the clearing as a space of creativity and security when they commit to "carving out space — a clearing, if you will — for Black folks to sit with the weight of antiblackness in education while also engaging in the political act of freedom dreaming, to imagine strategies for wrestling with our educational realities while building toward more just educational
futures."Guests in this series included:
- Dr. Stephanie Jones - Ending Curriculum Violence and Racial Trauma in the Classroom
- Dr. Monica Cox - Moving Beyond Diversity Initiatives to Authentic Equity: A Call to Accompliceship
- Ephraim Asili - Transgressive Transcendence
- Coco Fusco - Illicit Incursions in the Cuban Public Sphere
The Griot Institute Spring 2024 Speaker Series demanded a focus on joy as an indispensable subject of academic and social inquiry. For good reason, we are usually more attuned to Black suffering than to Black joy. A critical challenge raised by Language and Literature Professor Moradewun Adejunmobi is the question, "What would studying African pleasures, beyond censorious judgment, look like?" If we extend this question to the global African Diaspora, what might Black joy look like beyond hypercritical assessment? What would happen if we were approving, sympathetic and admiring of Black joy? As Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts contends, authorizing ourselves to examine and experience Black joy is an act of resistance.
As scholars, we are trained to critically analyze, identify and disseminate social critiques of the essentialized and problematic. In relation to Black lives and cultures, the perniciousness of racism makes a focus on joy feel frivolous against the physical, social and economic violence daily inflicted on Black people.
Admittedly, joy is complicated. Just Black joy is elusive and entangled with grief, antagonism and brutality. The hazardous precondition of Blackness — resulting from the paranoid perceived threat to Whiteness — leaves Black people in a perpetually perilous state of subjection and subjecthood robbed of joy. Deprived of unfettered joy, Black subjects and Black agents unapologetically make joy through creative expressions of Black humanity, which Arthur Jafa has referred to as "Black visual intonation" and Genevieve Hyacinthe has called "radical virtuosity."
Centering and embracing the fullness of Black humanity demands an intentional and multivalent examination of Black joy. In an effort to explore Black joy as more than frivolous and irresponsible but rather as an essential subject, speakers discuss ed— through the various disciplines and intellectual traditions — how one achieves and expresses joy through art, fashion, language, philosophy, social media and more.
Guests in this series included:
- Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts - Black Joy: A Strategy for Healing, Freedom, and Reckoning
- Ayana Ife - Ayana Active: The Joy in Being Your Own Hero
- T. Oliver Reid - Joy . . . Unspeakable Joy
- Ibiyinka Alao - Joys in Blackness: Fireflies’ Profound Lyric Lessons in the Dark
- Dr. Moradewun Adejunmobi - Joy and Pleasure Matters: African Pop Culture
- LaToya Hobbs - An Embodiment of Joy, Rest and Renewal
Legacies are loaded with contradictions. At once full of privilege, possibility, challenge and the weight of the past, legacies make demands of us in the contemporary world. Carried by each of us, legacies shape how we experience the present day as well as the future.
Questions we asked and thought through regarding legacies include:
- Do legacies extend across centuries or are they made anew each generation?
- To what extent can people reshape legacies?
- In what ways do legacies shape people’s lives, survival and futures?
- How are legacies unearthed when many people’s experiences and contributions are excluded from official archives?
- How do we – and should we – archive legacies?
- What legacies do we choose to narrate or curate and which ones do we ignore?
- To what extent do legacies provoke social consciousness and activism?
- How do we arrive at consciousness of legacies that allow us to create and realize better futures?
Guests in this series included:
- Eric Deggans and Shirley Jennifer Lim - Legacies of Race and Hollywood
- Joy James - The 1969 “United Front Against Fascism” Conference and Current U.S. Society
- Vernese Edghill-Walden - Legacies That Transform Community
- Terri Lyne Carrington - A Cultural Transformation in Jazz
Scholars and practitioners of technology have long been focused on efficiencies while scholars of the human experience have pushed for understanding the impacts of technology on individuals and human life broadly. Scholars like Safiya Noble and Aarati Akkapeddi have challenged the neutrality of digital technologies. Others like Ruha Benjamin and Mark S. Luckie have demonstrated the contradictory beneficial and detrimental impacts technologies have on people's lives. Of particular interest in this yearlong exploration are the ways artists and humanities scholars have engaged a range of technologies both analog and digital to reveal the human experience and to narrate human stories. The Griot Institute has planned a series of opportunities for community members to explore and critically analyze these issues in readings, lectures, music, movements, and discussions. This intellectual endeavor and the accompanying programming will provide a multifaceted set of engagements to address critical questions surrounding people's strategies for raising awareness about and disrupting obstacles with various technologies.
Guests in this series included:
- J. Khadijah Abdurahman - Can't Calculate The Souls of Black Folks: Predictive Analytics in the Child Welfare System
- Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - Black Feminism in Space
- André Brock - This, That, and a Third: Black Joy as Cyberculture
- Hanif Abdurraqib - Fireside Chat
- Ruha Benjamin - Race to the Future? Slowing Down to Reimagine Race, Technology, and Everyday Life in the 21st century
- Sona Jobarteh - Transforming Education in Africa
- Boris Willis - Creating Interactive Digital Black Experiences
In 2021, The Griot Institute celebrated its 10th year anniversary! The theme for 2021's Spring Series was Artists, Agitators & Visionaries — Chronicling Our Stories, which sought to promote the narrativity of artistic, political and historical expression as a means of better understanding and recording history. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 Griot Spring Series events was held virtually on Zoom.
Guests in this series included:
- Rudolph Ware - Talisman Textualities: Afro-Islamic Epistemology in Medieval West Africa
- Yacouba Sissoko - Discussion/Performance with SIYA (West African Musicians)
- Coco Fusco - The Right to Have Rights: Cuban Artists Challenge the State
- Nathaniel Hunt - Advocacy & Movement: A Look into the Use of Storytelling Through Dance to Express, Advocate and Uplift
- Kia Corthron - Q&A session with professor Jaye Austin Williams.
The Griot 2020 spring series explored aspects of Black radical thought as a continuing presence in the historical and contemporary discourse(s) on "racism." At the turn of the last century, historian, sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a now all-too-familiar quote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Du Bois' identification of systemic racism as the most significant issue of the last century was not only prescient, but also describes the racial realities of the current century. Many Black thinkers and artists have considered and wrestled with "racism" and how to address it.
One constellation of thought is often referred to as Black radical thought. The iterations of this Griot series, being offered in conjunction with the Program in Africana Studies and the Department of English, will reflect on the meanings, significances and impacts of this ever-expanding and multifarious realm of thought in confronting the intractable presence of racism in and as the American project.
Guests in this series included:
- Nikki Giovanni - Black Radical Thought & Art- Multidisciplinarily Considered: Grit, Grace and Glow
- Darrick Hamilton - Breaking Up the Paradigm of Racial Stratification and Iterative Concentration of Economic and Political Power: A New Vision Beyond Neoliberalism
- Antoinette Nwandu - Black Radical Thought & Art: A Conversation
**The final two speakers, Ishmael Reed and Dayo Gore, did not come to campus due to the COVID-19 closure of the campus in March 2020.
In 1990, film critic Lisa Kennedy coined the phrase "the black familiar" to describe elements of black culture that she maintains are readily identifiable and, therefore, familiar. In the spring of 2019, Bucknell's Griot Institute for Africana Studies invited the campus community to participate in a series that considers, in the face of the new century, the ways that scholars, artists and practitioners have reconsidered familiar aspects of black culture, intellectual inquiry and artistic production and have troubled traditional notions of black familiarity. These endeavors ranged from a reimagining of black theological traditions in terms of secular humanism, demythologizing of the realities of contemporary black immigration and asylum policy, and a rewriting of Confederate histories in light of black experience.
Guests in this series included:
- Edwidge Danticat: (Re)Writing the Black Immigrant Experience
- Christy Coleman: Reclaiming Black History in the American Civil War
- DeShuna Spencer: Black Representation
- Margo Natalie Crawford: Black Post-Blackness
- Rochelle Spencer: Afro-Surrealism
- Baz Dreisinger: Black Incarceration Narratives
- Carol Wayne White: Black Lives and Sacred Humanity
From the meditations of Ralph Ellison's classic novel, Invisible Man, to the lack of individuation of the varied and variable countries that make up the African continent in the public imagination, the realities of erasure — the disappearance of black identities, black selfhood, black lives, black histories, black countries, black freedoms, black accomplishments and more — has been a pervasive feature of black experience for hundreds of years. Erasure is, perhaps, one of the most virulent forms of racist oppression.
In the spring of 2018, the Griot Institute for Africana Studies engaged the topic of erasure from multiple disciplinary, artistic, and intellectual perspectives. Centering Percival Everett's novel Erasure as a focal point, the series brought to campus a wide array of scholars and artists to consider the impacts of this eviscerating phenomenon of erasure.
Guests in this series included:
- Rebecca Moore: The Erasure and (Re)Inscription of African Americans from the Jonestown Narrative
- Percival Everett: Erasure, the Novel: A Reading and Conversation with Percival Everett and Anthony Stewart
- C. Riley Snorton: Violence, Erasure, and the Invisibility of the Black Trans Community
- A Band Called Death (Bobby Hackney and Dennis Hackney): A Band Called Death and Black Erasure
- Scott Ellsworth: The 1921 Tulsa Riot and the Erasure of Black History
- Jason Osder: Film Screening of Let the Fire Burn, followed by discussion
- Dread Scott: Activism and the Erasure of Subversive Art: Imagine a World Without America
- Pamela Newkirk: Erasure and the Tale of the Captivity, Display and Death of Ota Benga
This series engaged the campus community and beyond in an extended conversation about the black body from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The series, Black Body (Re)Considered, was rooted in questions about the intersections of identity, race, gender, sexuality, historical context and agency, particularly as they concern representations and realities of the black body as impacted by racism, as well as aesthetic, economic, sociological and psychological inequalities.
Guests in this series included:
- Bayo Holsey: The Black Body as Embodied Memories: Retelling the Slave Trade in West Africa
- Nona Faustine Simmons: The Black Body as Art
- Rosamond King: The Black Body: Caribbean. Queer: Beyond Stereotypes
- Harriet Washington: The Black Body and Medicine
- Nyle Fort: The Black Body and Religion
- Harvey Young: The Black Body and Performance
- Abby Dobson: Performance and Workshop
- Dorothy Roberts: Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty
- George Yancy: Black Bodies/White Gazes
The series had two main focal points. One was a scholarly conversation showcasing James Baldwin's astute and uncompromising analysis of institutional forms of racism, heteronormative sexuality and anti-body sentiments found in dominant religious systems and tenets of his day.
The other was an extended conversation with leading African-American artists about their creative journeys in light of the contemporary structural realities of the United States, particularly as they concern artistic expression and racism and the intersections of aesthetic, economic, sociological, and psychological inequality. Each of the artists presenting used Baldwin's legacy as a springboard for conversations about their own work and processes and their intersections with social justice.
Events and guests in this series included:
- James Baldwin Film: The Price of the Ticket
- Monica Simpson (SisterSong)
- Judith Jamison (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre)
- Clarence Hardy (Yale Divinity School)
- Michael L. Cobb (University of Toronto)
- Caryl Phillips (novelist)
- Adrian Matejka (Indiana University in Bloomington)
- Carlton Mackey (Emory University)
- Roundtable Discussion: Baldwin’s Influence on Contemporary Scholarship in the Humanities
This series extended the conversation and narrative about the myriad significances, meanings, and cultural transformations available to America after it elected its first African American President. Particularly, we deliberated the symbolic, ideological, iconographic impacts on Americans' conceptions of themselves as a people. For instance, in what ways has the United States been changed as a result of electing Obama: in terms of race relations, political progress, a newly emboldened conservatism and other aspects of life in America in the 21st century.
Events and guests in this series included:
- Ta-Nehisi Coates: Barack Obama, Ferguson, and Evidence of Things Unsaid
- Charles Blow: The Obamas, Race and Slights
- Lisa Thompson: Performances of Cultural Trauma: Black Theatre in the (Post-)Obama Era
- Percival Everett: Post Obama Paradigms: Problems and Potentialities, a Conversation with Percival Everett
- Travis L Gosa: Black Popular Music in the Post-Obama Era, An Age of Color-Blindness & Racial Paranoia
- English 290 Post-Obama Paradigm Digital Narrative Student Presentations with assistance from Paloma McGregor, Robert Gainer, Anthony Stewart
The aim of the Griot Institute’s The Civil Rights Movement: Fifty Years Later series is to offer the University and the local community an opportunity to examine the histories of the American Civil Rights Movement, in an effort to extend the conversation and to acknowledge and define the necessity and current trajectories of the primary goal of the movement: to enable the US to fulfill its articulated principles, guaranteeing equality to all of its citizens.
Events and guests in this series included:
- Film Screening: The Abolitionists
- Bernice Johnson-Reagon: Lecture/Discussion
- Film Screening: Slavery by Another Name
- Barry Long: Freedom Songs
- Jonathan Rieder: Lecture/Discussion
- Film Screening: Freedom Riders
- Sonia Sanchez: Lecture/Discussion
- Ernest Green: Lecture/Discussion
- Film Screening: The Loving Story
- Kathleen Cleaver: Lecture/Discussion
- Freedom Riders Exhibit at Bertrand Library
Marking the 35th anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, this series offered an interdisciplinary examination of the narratives that surround the Jonestown massacre from multiple perspectives - a narrative that engages fundamental questions of religion, race, nationality, power, civil rights, sexuality, poverty, aspiration, and identity that are not disconnected from the dilemmas of the present moment.
Events and guests in this series included:
- Fielding “Mac” McGehee: Archiving History: Documenting Jonestown
- Rebecca Moore: A Dream Deferred: The Promise and Pathos of Peoples Temple
- Documentary: Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple
- Stanley Nelson: Documenting Jonestown
- Leigh Fondakowski: Narrating Jonestown: Transforming History into Art
- Jordan Vilchez: Women’s Lives in the Peoples Temple
- Tim Carter: Remembering the People of the Peoples Temple
- Julia Scheeres: Narrating Jonestown and the Peoples Temple
- Stephan Jones: Jonestown: Yesterday and Today
In this series we explored and examined the various narratives of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in terms of their historical and contemporary resonances and significances. The series offered multiple disciplinary perspectives and employed the expertise and artistry of guest lecturers and performers in order to present the various nuances and dimensions of the tale.
Events and guests in this series included:
- Joshua Rothman: Jefferson, Callender, and Interracial Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Virginia
- PBS Frontline Film: Jefferson’s Blood
- Mendi and Keith Obadike: Sound Installation - American Cypher:Stereo Helix for Sally Hemings
- Shay Banks-Young and Julia Jefferson Westerinen: The Affairs of Race in America: A Conversation in Black and White
- Eric Gable: What Heritage Does and Does Not Do to Identify: The Case of Hemings and Jefferson
- Helen F. M. Leary: Jefferson & Genetics: The DNA Tests
- Trip to Monticello
- Robert Gainer, Shara McCallum: Sally Hemings: An Artistic Montage
Visiting artist E. Patrick Johnson led students and staff in ta three-day performance workshop. The workshop resulted in participants performing monologues concerning issues of race, gender, and identity in the 21st century as part of an interactive artistic installation. Another main feature of the installation was visual art and poetry on the same theme, created by students in the courses of Professors Fennell, Gillespie, Long, Marincih, McCallum, Peterson, Ponnuswami, and Williams. E. Patrick Johnson closed the events with a performance of his one-man play, Pouring Tea.