Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My presentation will examine the “programs in progress”—fragmentary epistles, flashcards and proposals—undertaken by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica while he lived and worked, undocumented and underground, in the United States. Written in English as well as Brazilian Portuguese, but also full of neologisms and idiosyncratic, invented typographical tendencies that make them as visual as they are literary, these notes imagined, and even attempted to realize, utopian possibilities within the heart of the very empire that was in the process of restructuring the Brazil Oiticica was forced to flee. These are works that defy conventional definitions of the (art)work precisely in their bearing on their surfaces the marks of artistic labor in progress. They were produced primarily through conversations and collaborations with other artists and acquaintances—fellow Brazilians who had also fled the U.S. backed dictatorship but also people Oiticica encountered in and around various New York art, sex and drug underworlds—and they embody, in the very incoherence of their form, the traces of these conversations and collaborations. Oiticica hoped, moreover, that they would be further elaborated by way of experimental engagements on the part of their readers. But while it appears that Oiticica had planned at one point or another to compile them into an encyclopedic volume he referred to as Newyorkaises, or sometimes Conglomerado, this volume was never published. Those fragments that did circulate at the time circulated privately, sometimes even secretly. By exploring bits and pieces of what would have been Newyorkaises I will address the strange form and social life these documents, or rather undocuments (underground documents produced by an undocumented migrant worker) take on and even valorize while also attempting to explain how they open up new definitions and new critiques of work, the work, authorship and citizenship, and the relation between these and the possibilities of new utopian political dispositions.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: In the sixties strange things begin to happen. H. Rap Brown used the .black power creed as a source of power to control plans of Columbia University to build a gym on 30.1 acres of Morningside Park in Harlem. H. Rap Brown was called Rap because he could “sure work a crowd” When the Student Afro American Society (SAS) had taken over Hamilton Hall and a hostage Dean Coleman... H. Rap Brown entered and announced, “We want to thank you for taking the first steps in this struggle. SNCC is now in charge.”. Six large, black males approached five white jocks that refused to abandon guardianship of the Dean. The black men moved them. There are in fact relatively simple problems in the morals which cannot be decided from the laws. The black power creed generated an irresistible power to resolve the conflict. The five white jocks left and six black guards formed outside Coleman’s door. Power is the production of intended effects.When reporters came they had no option but to put their mike in an Afro-American face. H. Rap Brown’s strategy is replicable. Promptness of decision, Unity of command, strict discipline and rhetoric to “work a crowd”. We propose H. Rap Brown as a not to be forgotten worthy in African- American History.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: It is difficult to overstate the extent to which America’s mental-health policy in the post-bellum era has been solely concerned with the needs of white communities. Intellectual precept, as well as institutional provision, were equally responsible for discriminating against the treatment of African American clients. For decades the vast majority of mental-health officials subscribed to the belief that non-white—or to use the common parlance, “non-classical”—clients did not have the “ego suitability” to benefit from such therapies. Even today such asymmetries are reflected in the striking lack of black psychiatrists registered with the discipline’s principal guild, the American Psychiatric Association. And traditional narratives of mental-health care have, therefore, been content to absent black people from such histories.
But, in much the same way that the literature on settlement houses ignored race because of its failure to consider the work carried out in African American community centers, so the same is true of histories of psychiatry. In churches, social clubs, sororities, and other institutions across America’s black communities, the post-war period witnessed a concerted interest in psychological testing and the provision of mental-illness therapies. As well as the better-known institutions like Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic or the Clarks’ Northside Center, both of which opened in 1946, a number of other community associations began to discuss the necessity for providing their constituencies with such programs in this period. Focusing principally on the work of the James Weldon Johnson Community Center in East Harlem, this paper will consider, quite mechanically, the types of therapies and the reasons given for them that such organizations began offering from the early 1950s.
This was not a project that simply affected black Americans however. For these efforts were part of a broader transformation of American psychiatric knowledge, a transformation which turned psychiatrists into political commentators, and a discipline previously animated by the pathologies of individual into one more concerned with those of society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper re-considers the meaning and role of non-violence in the civil rights movement. Focus is on three thinkers: Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, and the little-known president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., Rev. Joseph H. Jackson.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Franklin Giddings, one of the founders of the American
Sociological Society and its third president, is known as the
leading proponent of statistical methods in sociology during that
era, and as the first person to hold a professorship of sociology
in any American university (namely at Columbia University
beginning in 1894). Not so well known is the fact that Giddings
had also taught at Mount Holyoke, albeit briefly and in a
temporary position. Rereading works from a century ago shows a
recent accusation that he used quantitative sociology as a cover
for sexism to be false, or at least not proven with the evidence
offered; but he did exaggerate the importance of precise
calculation while at the same time doing little of it himself.
Some items from a computational museum show how work that would
today be done on a computer (or an electronic calculator) would
have been done in Giddings' time. Among these are adding machines
and logarithm tables, which he espoused, and slide rules, which
he may have disdained as not sufficiently precise for the 'exact
science' he wanted sociology to become. Working through some
sample calculations by historic means may give insight into
certain aspects of how the early discipline of sociology
developed.