The Department of African American and African Studies is pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturere Series Presentation featuring Dr. John Jackson. The talk is scheduled for Noon, Friday, 10/10/14 in 165 Thompson Library (Multipurpose Room) with a film screening for Dr. Jackson's film Bad Friday at 6:15pm (same date and location). For more information please contact, Dr. Devin Fergus at fergus.24@osu.edu or the Department of African American and African Studies at 292-3700.

This talk will offer an overview of Dr. Jackson’s research with the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a transnational community of African-American expats based in southern Israel (but also with “saints,” as members are called, spread out across five continents). This is a group that has (a) revised its relationship to conventional forms of African American spirituality, (b) developed a self-conscious commitment to “health literacy” among its members (including mandatory   veganism), and (c) modeled a version of Diasporic subjectivity that tells us interesting and unconventional things about the potential meanings of race and place in the 21^st century. To learn more about his research, see Thin Descriptions.

Bad Friday examines a bit of the history of state-sponsored violence against Rastafari in Jamaica. Rastafarians might be the most iconic representation of Jamaica in the world today, but in the mid-20^th century they were considered enemies of the Jamaican state. This film interviews some of the elders who withstood the “persecutions”.