The Ninth Annual Honora Rankine-Galloway Address

“Will Race Survive in the US? The Possibilities and Impossibilities of the Obama Phenomena”

By Professor David Roediger,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sponsored by the Embassy of the United States, Copenhagen

Center for American Studies

University of Southern Denmark, Odense

Thursday, September 25, 2008

14:15-16:00, Room 100

This lecture, based on David Roediger’s shortly forthcoming How Race Survived United States History (Verso), sets the historic presidential candidacy of Barack Obama within longer patterns of white supremacy in the U. S. past. It argues that the successes of Obama’s candidacy register important, though contradictory, changes in racial attitudes in the post-1965 U.S. At the same time, the “Obama Phenomenon” also obscures the extent to which the structural factors leading to race-thinking persist and raises critical questions regarding the political challenges of moving past a view of race predicated on the simple dualism of black and white.

Professor Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class, and Politics (London and New York: Verso Books, 1994); and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso Books, 1999).

All Welcome!

For further information, please contact Dr. Benita Heiskanen, Center for American Studies, SDU-Odense, email benita@hist.sdu.dk, tel. +45-6550 3133.

Seminar, Copenhagen University: "What is an American in the twenty-first century?"

Reading from their work and discussing the question

“What is an American in the twenty-first century?”

Thursday 6 December, 13-16, 22.0.11

JUNOT DÌAZ was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New Jersey at the age of six. He published his debut collection of short stories, Drown, in 1997; the volume became a bestseller and won the PEN/Malamud Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published to widespread acclaim in 2007.

RICK MOODY was born in New York. His debut novel, Garden State, was published in 1992, and was followed by The Ice Storm (1994; a well received film adaptation appeared in 1997). Moody has maintained a prolific rate of publication: his other books include the novels Purple America (1998) and The Diviners (2007); the short story collection Demonology (2001); and the memoir The Black Veil (2002).

EMMY PÉREZ is from Santa Ana, California. Her first collection of poems, Solstice, appeared in 2003. She has published her poetry and short stories in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, Story, Indiana Review, and North American Review. She teaches creative writing and English at the University of Texas, Pan American.

for more info email: bone@hum.ku.dk