The Centre for American Studies are hosting the following lectures:

• Suffering, Struggle, Survival: The Activism, Artistry, and Authorship of Frederick Douglass and Family (1818-2018) Celeste-Marie Bernier
  By Professor of Black Studies, University Edinburgh
  Thursday 30 November 2017 at 18.00
  In Grimond Building Lecture Theatre 1, University of Kent

  As we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, Prof. Bernier traces his activism, artistry and authorship alongside the sufferings and struggles for survival of his daughters and sons. As activists, educators, campaigners, civil rights protesters, newspaper editors, orators, essayists, and historians in their own right, Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Remond and Annie Douglass each played a vital role in the freedom struggles of their father. They were no less afraid to sacrifice everything they had as they each fought for Black civic, cultural, political, and social liberties by every means necessary. The fight for freedom was a family business to which all the Douglasses dedicated their lives as their rallying cry lives on to inspire today’s activism: “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”

• Spit Truth to Power? Occupy Wall Street and New York Hip Hop Culture
  By Dr Eithne Quinn, University of Manchester
  Wednesday 6 December 2017 at 18.00
  In Grimond Building Lecture Theatre 1, University of Kent

  Examining responses from hip-hop culture to the Occupy Wall Street mobilization of 2011, Dr Quinn’s talk focuses in particular on three rap entrepreneurial creatives, Russell Simmons, Shawn Carter (Jay Z), and Curtis Jackson (50 Cent). Occupy protested against extreme levels of inequality, declaring that it represented the 99 percent in opposition to the 1 percent financial elite. While these hip-hop moguls were all within the 1 percent ranks—they had nonetheless built star brands that represented people, in race and class terms, at the other end of the economic spectrum. This tension was negotiated in markedly different ways by the three moguls.

• Roosevelt, Rockwell, and the Four Freedoms: How a slip of the tongue inspired artists and changed the world
  By Dr James J.Kimble, Associate Professor of Communication and the Arts Seton Hall University, New Jersey
  Thursday 14 December 2017 at 18.00
  In Grimond Building Lecture Theatre 1, University of Kent

  Rockwell painted four homely images depicting the Four Freedoms, inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech delivered to Congress on the eve of World War II. The U.S. government subsequently issued posters of Rockwell’s paintings in a highly successful war bond campaign that raised more than $132 million for the war effort. Rockwell’s homely depictions of Roosevelt’s abstract concepts were widely popular across America. Dr Kimble explores how the paintings dramatised and personalised the president’s Four Freedoms and the implications of this transformation for conceptualising the rhetorical presidency.