2023 Liza Wemakor
“Black Naturalism, Black Speculation, and Terence Nance” 

Engaging black filmmaker Terence Nance’s body of work, Liza Wemakor examines how he produces a black naturalism that is "mobile, fluid, and responsive to the living black people that are his cinematic subjects." Wemakor shows how Nance's work makes visible the already existing tools of black liberation, the freedom that is already "moving within, behind, ahead, and alongside us."

Brief Biography:  Liza Wemakor is the recipient of the 2023 Lindon Barrett Award and the 2024 Emory Elliot Memorial Award. She studies black feminist fictions, speculative fiction, and representations of black realism and naturalism in twentieth and twenty-first century American media. She also writes speculative fiction. Her debut novella, Loving Safoa, was published by Neon Hemlock Press in February 2024. 

2022: Zora Duncan
“You’re not ready to be—”: Lorraine Hansberry,  Les Blancs, and the Interminable Rehearsal of Black Personhood

“This talk will be based upon my exploration of the dynamic between Lorraine Hansberry’s status as a monumental or mythic black political figure, the role of her former husband and collaborator (Robert Nemiroff) in our access to her archive, and the idea of a “visionary” Lorraine that drives contemporary literature on her life and work. I think through the weight that contemporary critical and cultural discourses place on Hansberry, even or especially in death. In doing so, I examine parallels between the playwright and the figure of “Eric,” a minor character in Les Blancs, whose functions to critique the cis-heteronormative and patriarchal limits of black revolutionary consciousness at the time. Through this minor character, Hansberry asks us to revise our method of engagement when looking to understand and articulate the complexities of black personhood.”

Brief Biography: Zora Duncan earned this award as a fourth-year doctoral student  in the English Department at UCR. Her work utilizes theater and theatricality as a framework for making interventions in black studies, queer of color critique, trans studies, and performance studies. In her work, she intends to think through rehearsal as an improvisatory space and time that hasn’t settled into the finality of performance, and a concept that can be mobilized when engaging with the question of alternatives.

2021: Alan Alexander Malfavón
"Kin of the Leeward Port: Afro-Mexicans in Veracruz in the Making of State Formation, Contested Spaces, and Regional Development, 1770-1835"

From his current book project of the same title, “Kin of the Leeward Port” focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward), and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period. It argues that Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands. Malfavón resituates Mexico’s socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean, and he dissects and problematizes those networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. Blacks and Afro-Mexicans shifted the late-colonial political landscape, connecting Mexico to both the broader Atlantic World and its many revolutions. Malfavón centers Afro-Mexicans both to recover lives and stories often excluded from the Mexican national narrative and to reframe the larger history of liberal politics in nineteenth-century Mexico.

Brief Biography: 
Alan Alexander Malfavón received his Ph.D. from UCR in 2021 and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University. His research interests center around Afro-Mexican, Greater Caribbean, Atlantic World, Veracruz, and African Diaspora histories. His work interrogates and subverts archival silences that have sought to erase Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of identity and nation-state formation. Malfavón diversifies these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives and actions of Afro-descendants as essential political and intellectual players in Mexico’s political and social consolidation as an independent nation.

2020: Aaron Brown
"Torn to Pieces: The Dismembering of Black Autobiographical Subjectivity"

While enduring the contemporary bastions of Antebellum life, Black people are forced to carry the burden of articulation. Using a white affective lexicon, whose tenure is granted through a history of ownership and bodily violence, to articulate Black pain creates ruptures within the ontology of the afterlife of enslavement. These tears, dismembering the Black whole into pieces for legibility, are indicative of a rhetorical practice used in an approximal transcription of Black pain. In this talk, I encounter pain as an entry-point to being and begin to examine the racialized measures involved in articulation. The goal of this conversation is not to attempt to determine the parameters from which Black bodies are to speak about their pain. Instead, I interrogate a racialized societal insistence upon black people to articulate something as complex as their pain through means created by the people harming them. Using the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789) as a starting point, I explore the interworking of a racialized legacy of articulation,one that requires the black body to be torn into figurative (and sometimes literal) pieces for the pain experienced by black bodies to be nominally comprehended. 

Brief Biography: Aaron Brown earned this award as a fourth-year doctoral student in the English department at the University of California, Riverside. He earned his B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University (2017) and his M.A. in English at UCR (2019). His scholarly work is in the fields of African American/Black Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies and is methodologically informed by History, Religious Studies, and American Studies. His research critically engages with questions of white mastery and its intersections with various aspects of queer American life.