American Studies Fall 2023 Colloquium - Race, Class, and Black Radical Visions
Title: What Shall Bind Us?: Africa, Diaspora and the Hard Work of Solidarity

Speaker: Professor Fanon Che Wilkins
*speaker will be remote

Lunch will be available at 11:45am for in-person attendees

Bio: Fanon Che Wilkins is Professor of History at Pasadena City College and hails from Los Angeles, California. He was raised by activists parents who cut their political teeth organizing in South LA in the 1960s. As a child of the movement Wilkins spent a great deal of his early years attending independent Black schools and passing time in meetings concerned with ending South African apartheid.

A graduate of Morehouse College, Wilkins holds a Masters Degree and a Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University and New York University respectively. Wilkins’ scholarship explores the politics of African Liberation solidarity activity in the 1960s and is concerned with the global contours of Black Power. He co-edited From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution with Michael O. West and Bill Martin (2009). His scholarship has appeared in numerous edited collections, the Journal of African American History and Radical History Review among others.

For 15 years Wilkins was Associate Professor of History and African American Studies in the Graduate School of Global Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He is a member of the Association Study of African American Life and History, National Council for Black Studies, the Japan Black Studies Association, and the American Studies Association.