Amid the US-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine and the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan, the constellation of transnational and multiracial movement solidarities forged throughout the myriad capitalist and colonialist crises of the 21st century continue to reckon with the precarity of their uneven legibility across various regional, continental, and global contexts. Expanding on the titular catalogue essay composed alongside The Art Institute of Chicago’s current exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, this talk navigates a genealogy of similarly unsettled anticolonial solidarities throughout Africa and its diaspora during the Non-Aligned era. By narrowing in on the contentious relationship between “North” and “Sub-Saharan” African artistic production in this period – particularly during the 1969 “First” Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers – I explore how varying articulations and mis/translations of Blackness, Arabness, and Africanness in the political and cultural realm ultimately elude a stable and coherent Pan-African sensibility. However, I also contend that the necessarily fleeting nature of these cultural encounters did still chart routes towards an African diasporic relation of difference that strives towards the most emancipatory possibilities of a transnational and anticolonial practice of solidarity.

Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia’s current book project, Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab, explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Sophia is a frequent contributor to The Funambulist magazine.

WINTER 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.