RIDGS Keynote Lecture with Roderick Ferguson

Dr. Roderick Ferguson (Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University) will present a RIDGS Keynote Lecture entitled: “Civilizing Missions and the Hampton Project: Carrie Mae Weems.” Dr. GerShun Avilez (Dean, College of Liberal Arts) will serve as discussant.

 

This talk examines artist Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Hampton Project.” This installation depicted the buried and controversial history of how predominantly black Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) was the location for an assimilationist project for African Americans and a settler colonial project for Native Americans, projects that would attempt to turn both groups into proper citizen-laborers. In doing so, the talk deals with the simultaneous training of blacks and native peoples into the norms of American and Western civilization. The talk argues that the different procedures by which the students were socialized into dominant ideologies cannot be understood without an appreciation of their overlaps. The chapter is from the upcoming book In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought, scheduled to be released Spring of 2026.

This event is free and open to the public.