Brooklyn College Library LibGuides Home: Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2023-24: Faculty & Staff Reading Group

About the Faculty & Staff Reading Group

This year the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities Faculty and Staff Reading Group will focus on 2023-24 Hess Scholar Paul Ortiz’s groundbreaking An African American and Latinx History of the United States (2018). At a time in this country where teaching these very histories is under attack, it is particularly urgent to read, learn and discuss these histories. Questions and themes we will consider:

How does the book help us to fill in gaps in our own knowledge of US history and politics and what do those gaps reveal?
What does it show us about the overlapping experiences and histories of African American and Latinx people and Afro-Latinx people? What does it show us about the differences in histories? And what changes when we consider both of these?
How does it challenge efforts to decolonize the college's curriculum? What specific ways might we change our own syllabi or the college's course offerings?
Given the attack on teaching Black history and ethnic studies, what does it show us about the longstanding nature and history of such attacks and the political, social and economic forces at play?
An African American and Latinx History disrupts the silos we often have between US history & politics and the rest of the Americas, between US domestic policy and US foreign policy? How is Ortiz demonstrating the need to see historical moments and domestic political events in light of broader colonial histories, to see the political economy of white supremacy across the Americas? What changes when we do?

The group will meet online at 4:00PM on the following Mondays: September 18, October 23 and November 20.

Reading Guide:

September 18:
Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Author's Note, Introduction and Chapters One and Two, pp. ix-53

October 23:
Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Chapters 6, 7, 8 and Epilogue, pp. 118-189

November 20:
Paul Ortiz joins the reading group!

Paul Ortiz, "Making History Matter," Kalfou 3:1 (2016), pp. 125-144

Robin. D. G. Kelley, "On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory, and other Felonious Ideas," in Our History Has Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, eds. Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Haymarket, 2023).

Report of the Presidential Task Force on African American and Native American History and the University of Florida

Readings

An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
Publication Date: 2018
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers-Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth-united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.
Our History Has Always Been Contraband by Colin Kaepernick (Editor); Robin D. G. Kelley (Editor); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Editor)
Publication Date: 2023
"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We're ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." --Colin Kaepernick Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum. Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others. Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back. To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all--through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.

Report of the Presidential Task Force on African American and Native American History and the University of Florida
University of Florida (April 2022)

Making History Matter by Paul Ortiz
in Kalfou 3:1 (2016), pp. 125-144.

Library &
Academic IT

Library & Academic IT

Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2023-24: Faculty & Staff Reading Group

About the Faculty & Staff Reading Group

Readings