NYU s Institute of African American Affairs will host Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition, and Creative Progress, Oct. 9-11, at NYU s Kimmel Center for University Life. Poet Maya Angelou will head the symposium s plenary session on Thurs., Oct. 9, 7 p.m. at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Blvd, 135th Street). Subways: 2, 3 (135th Street). For more information, call 212.998.IAAA (4222).
MEDIA ADVISORY
Maya Angelou Heads Plenary Session, Oct. 9 at Schomburg Center
New York Universitys Institute of African American Affairs will host Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition, and Creative Progress, Oct. 9-11, at NYUs Kimmel Center for University Life (60 Washington Square South, NYC). The global symposium, held 200 years after passage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Act made transporting or importing slaves in the United States or its territories illegal, will examine slavery, the slave trade, and its consequences today. Slave Routes will feature panel discussions, literary readings, musical performances, film and video screenings by distinguished scholars, writers, musicians, visual artists, and organizers from the U.S., Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. Subways: 6 (Astor Place); A, B, C, D, E, F, V (West 4th Street); R (8th Street); 1 (Christopher Street/Sheridan Square).
Poet Maya Angelou will head the symposiums plenary session on Thurs., Oct. 9, 7 p.m. at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Blvd, 135th Street). Subways: 2, 3 (135th Street). The plenary will also include poet and activist Amiri Baraka, Mary Frances Berry, former chairperson of the Civil Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton, and Ali Mazrui, director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at SUNY-Binghamton.
Symposium sessions include the following: Post Emancipation Consequences, Points of Memory: New Orleans, Ancient Route of the Slave and Modern Route of the African Immigrant, Jazz is Modern Music, and Innovations in the Black Freedom Movement.
All symposium sessions are free and open to the public. For more information, call 212.998.IAAA (4222). To register for the conference and for a complete schedule of sessions, go to: http://africanastudies.as.nyu.edu/object/slaveroutes08.
The event will conclude with a concert on Sat., Oct. 11, 8:30-10:30 p.m. at NYUs Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square South). The concert will include performances by: Randy Weston, Fred Ho, Muhal Richard Abrams, Aniyikaye (Yoruba drum & voice ensemble), Bill Cole Ensemble (Bill Cole, Harrison Bankhead, Joe Daily, Warren Smith), Jayne Cortez and the Firespitter Band (Denardo Coleman, TK Blue, Bern Nix, Lakecia Benjamin, Al MacDowell), and Nat Dove. Tickets are $10. To purchase, call 212.352.3101 or go to www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu.
EDITORS NOTE: The Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University was founded in 1969 to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic world and beyond. IAAA is committed to the study of Blacks in modernity through concentrations in Pan-Africanism and Black Urban Studies. For more, go to http://africanastudies.as.nyu.edu/page/IAAA.