For Immediate Release:  September 6, 2006
Contact:  Marsha Nishi Mullan     
610-328-8535      
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Talk on Black Power, Global Solidarity, and Historical Rise of Ethnic Nationalism to Begin Series on Cross Cultural Collaborations

Historian Fanon Che Wilkins will speak at Swarthmore College on "Black Power, Global Solidarity, and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism, 1965-1980" on Tuesday, Sept. 12, at 4:30 p.m. His talk, in the Science Center Cunniff Hall (Room 199), is free and open to the public.

Dr. Wilkins is a scholar of the global contours of 1960s' black radicalism and hip-hop cultural production and historical memory, and his research grows out of experiences as a founding member of the early '90s hip-hop group Poetic Guerilla Unit. An anti-apartheid activist, he was featured on the Phil Donahue Show with raptivist Sista Soulja, student leader Ras Baraka, and public intellectual Cornel West, and was an organizer and participant in the Seventh Pan-African Congress in Kampala, Uganda. He has lectured worldwide and has just become an associate professor of history in the Graduate School of American Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He holds degrees in history from Morehouse College and Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from New York University.

This is the first talk in the series, "Cross Cultural Collaborations: Race, Culture and Politics," and is co-sponsored by the Black Studies Program and the Intercultural Center. This series on race and history is designed to focus attention on cross racial connections/alliances between people of color in the United States and within a global context.