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An initiative of Strike MoMA Working Group
Kazembe Balagun, Shellyne Rodriguez, Marz Saffore, Amin Husain, and Nitasha Dhillon in conversation on Wednesday, April 13, 6:30-8pm
The role of study in militant struggle will be centered in this discussion. What is the thinking that has walked alongside our lived experiences and our movements? What texts are still relevant, what has been overlooked, and who is writing today that we should be looking at more closely? Kazembe Balagun and Shellyne Rodriguez will be in open dialogue and reading passages from the books that have influenced their political thinking beginning with the declaration by the Guyanese militant and academic Walter Rodney that, "the Black intellectual, the Black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the Black masses... they are the enemy of the people until proven otherwise." At a time when the university has so thoroughly pronounced itself as a hedge fund and a real estate company, the call for exiting these structures transforms Rodney's words into a call to action. Join the conversation, listen in, and tell us, what are you reading?
Kazembe Balagun is a writer and cultural activist, He is the Project Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and, from 2007 to 2013, he was the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Brecht Forum. For much of the 1990s he was a member of the direct action/ people of color led Student Liberation Action Movement, as well as Critical Resistance East. He has organized programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Maysles Cinema, and The Marxist Education Project. His writings can be found in Imagine Socialist USA, Conversations with Octavia Butler, and more recently Finally Got the News: The Printed Legacy of the Radical Left 1970-1979.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.
Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon will participate as facilitators.