Mangia con noi! Bring your lunch and chat with us! Pitt students only, all levels welcome!

Connect with Pitt colleagues and peers while you create an alebrije!

Design and make your own hand-carved copal wood animal (materials provided) as we talk about the origins and history of this unique art form.

Snacks will be provided!

This workshop is presented by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Center for Creativity.

Please register here: https://calendar.pitt.edu/event/alebrije_workshop_9174#

This talk offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. From the start, the initiative attracted scrutiny from ecologist and climate scientists who argue, rightly, that the GGW was based on the notion of a universally advancing desert border. By upstreaming, or working back in history, this talk will examine how longstanding narratives of environmental decline, deforestation, and soil erosion have been redeployed in efforts to construct the GGW. In focusing specifically on Senegal, which has already devoted significant labor and capital to the initiative, Dr. Cropper will explore how government officials and development experts have relied on ‘declensionist’ tropes – deforestation, desiccation, food scarcity – to legitimize the project, even when the science has undermined its initial aims. Put simply, he will argue that narratives of environmental decline have served as a dynamic framework to rationalize the exploitation of the Sahel’s environments and have become the fetishized commodities of a global neoliberal economy.

Dr. Ruth Mostern, Professor of History and Director of the World History Center will moderate.

This lecture considers the problem of the cultural value of political mystifications, forgeries, and appropriations. In doing so, I will focus on the historical and ideological contexts (in particular, the role of the Communist International in Moscow) of one of the most popular “songs of protest,” which was published by the American folklorist and pro-Communist activist from a Jewish-Hungarian family Lawrence Gellert’s (1898-1979) in his influential collection of African-American political songs (1936). In the 1930s, the song was translated into several languages and published in various left-wing periodicals, set to music, illustrated, performed in various countries, choreographed, interrogated by the American government as a part of “the propagandistic play,” and, all in all, embodied the anti-religious nature of a revolutionary new genre of song created by Black Americans. It eventually became an integral part of many communist singers’ repertoire (from Paul Robeson, William Bowers, and Pete Seeger to Ernst Busch). In this lecture, I show that the poem itself was both an ideological construct and a significant cultural fact which helped to introduce a new musical genre and secretly promoted the Soviet political agenda of the mid-1930s.

Please note:

The pre-screening presentation will be held at 6:30 PM in the Italian Nationality Room (CL 116) at the University of Pittsburg's Cathedral of Learning.

The film will be shown at 7:30 PM in the Frick Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM.

Synopsis:
During World War II, the U.S Government restricted the actions and freedoms of 600,000 Italian residents of the United States. All were declared “Enemy Aliens,” and many were placed under curfew, banned from their workplaces, evacuated from their homes and communities, and even placed in internment camps.

Many of these people had been in the United States for decades, had children born in their adopted country, and had sons serving in the U.S. Military.

During that era, Italians made up the biggest foreign-born group in the country. As the Department of Justice would later say, “The impact of the wartime experience was devastating to the Italian-American communities in the United States, and its effects are still being felt.”

Interned Italians were not charged with a crime or allowed legal representation. They were subjected to “loyalty hearings” and held for the duration of the war. The United States government considered them “Potentially Dangerous,” not based on anything they had done, but on where they were born.

Most Italians refused to speak about what happened to them. Even 80 years later, many have remained silent. Until now. Hear their stories for the first time in Potentially Dangerous.

Director: Zach Baliva

All films are sponsored by the History Center's Italian American program, the University of Pittsburgh's European Studies Center, and Italian Nationality Room (part of the Nationality Rooms & Intercultural Exchange Programs). Film screenings are free to the public and will take place in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium on the University of Pittsburgh campus.