Rinaldo Walcott: Neilly Series Lecture

The River Campus Libraries and Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies invite you to attend a Neilly Author Series talk from Rinaldo Walcott, a professor and the Carl V. Granger Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo.

The talk will explore the long struggle of freedom for Black people in the Americas. Drawing on recent examples, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, and historical ones, such as slave narratives, Walcott argues that freedom remains an unfinished project for Black people globally. His talk will pose questions for recent social movements concerning liberation, debates in and on Black studies, and the unfolding calls for reparations around the Black world.

As a writer and critic, Rinaldo Walcott’s research is in the area of Black diaspora cultural studies, gender, and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy, and education. He is also a widely published scholar of interdisciplinary Black Studies.

Walcott is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003), Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Insomniac Press, 2016), and co-author of Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (Arbeiter Ring, 2019). In 2021, he published The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom (Duke University Press). He also published On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis), which was nominated for several awards.