Professor Aisha Finch, discuss her new prize-winning book, RETHINKING SLAVE REBELLION IN CUBA, with Lisa Brock, George Lipsitz and Ula Taylor—three incredibly dynamic speakers and brilliant historians who have spent much of their lives unearthing and making sense of social movements.

In Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, Aisha Finch traces the emergence of a dynamic resistance movement of slaves and free people of color in nineteenth-century Cuba. Drawing from the largely unexplored testimonies in the Cuban National Archive, this book focuses attention on the hundreds of enslaved people who forged a radical, alternative vision of freedom in Cuba’s plantation countryside. Demonstrating that black slave women and non-elite slaves were critical to shaping and organizing this movement, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba offers new ways to think about slave mobilizations, black political struggles, and histories of rebellion.

Lisa Brock is the founding director of the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College and scholar of Black internationalism and editor of and contributor to the groundbreaking book, Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution.

George Lipsitz teaches Black Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Barbara and author of a dozen books on race, social movements, urban culture, and inequality, including A Rainbow at Midnight, Footsteps in the Dark, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, and How Racism Takes Place.  He is the chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Ula Taylor teaches at UC Berkeley in African American Studies, has produced groundbreaking scholarship on the history of Black women, Black feminist praxis, and nationalism.  Her books include the highly acclaimed The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey; (with J. Tarika Lewis and Mario Van Pebbles) Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film; and her forthcoming, Making a New Woman: Women and the Nation of Islam, 1930-1975.
Co-sponsored by: The Departments of African American Studies and Gender Studies