70 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2021 Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) Based within the Humanities Faculty of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) is an interdisciplinary, transnational hub for multimodal scholarship driven by Black/African/postcolonial feminist, queer and decolonial agendas of emancipation. The centre offers a home in the Southern Hemisphere for engaged scholarship around intellectual, creative, spiritual and everyday practices that both refuse and reimagine worlds shaped by the violent logics of white supremacy/coloniality, heteropatriarchy and global capitalism. At RGC, we understand that our work calls for a different kind of historical imagination, responsive to the multiple temporalities, geographies and specificities of Black and other discursively minoritarian experiences, and to the productive entanglements of indigenous, Black radical, Black feminist and anti-/decolonial forms of knowledge production. RGC’s commitment to thinking Blackness globally in tandem with other forms of racialisation and difference is grounded in a dynamic conception of the local, in which the particular histories and encounters that have informed Black political thought and praxis in South Africa are understood in relation to the intimacies, adjacencies and intersections of PanAfrican and Black diasporic emancipatory struggles. We recognise that South Africa’s particular conditions of continued violence have global resonance - entangled as they are in other histories, experiences and present conditions of racialised and gendered oppressive norms and class inequities. RGC offers a generative platform for the critical work of reimagination – for speculative thinking/doing that is framed by African and Black diasporic realities, struggles and complexities; and oriented towards reparative justice, radical intimacy, decolonisation and Black feminist love. 2021 Key Highlights/Performance RGC was established a little over a year ago in September 2020. I was appointed inaugural director and commenced my tenure from January 2021. I have spent the last year building and establishing RGC largely in terms of staff and programming. We appointed two postdoctoral fellows — Dr Felix Mutunga and Dr Sinethemba Makanya — who have tremendous potential in Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Black Studies. Our centre took on a Research Coordinator, James MacDonald, who spearheaded our website design and maintenance. Along with our three student assistants — Nandipha Swartbooi, Olusegun Olowoyo and Sibusiso Nkambule — RGC recruited ten (10) research associates, each a leading international scholar in their particular field. (See our RAs here.) In July Dr Letitia Smuts hosted a Sexuality Studies Winter School through her NIHSS-funded project, Frustraighting the Norm. Through our newly established community we were able to launch the RGC website in the second half of the year, host a hybrid book launch of Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze (2021) in partnership with New Frame and the Forge and run two key features of our Global Blackness Project: the reading group and the summer school. Global Blackness is an anchor project and research area at RGC. We use the term “global Blackness” to signal our interest in exploring the multiplicity of Black experience, intellectual traditions and perspectives as well as modes of Black theory. RGC’s Global Blackness project brings together scholars, activists, artists and everyday folks who seek to mediate on Blackness as a global category of identification and local iterations across different times and geopolitical locations. Through an annual November/December Summer School, a reading group programme, and other activations and partnerships, we explore what it means to be Black in the world today, and what it has meant. We ask: What are the geographies, practices and theories of Blackness with which we work? How is Blackness instantiated in different spacetimes? Our first Global Blackness reading group, entitled Race, Imperialism & the Making of Black Subjects, was led by RGC Research Associate Jemima Pierre. Pierre is Associate Professor at UCLA, jointly appointed in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology. With her overlapping interests in African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: race and political economy, transnationalism and diaspora, and the cultural politics of knowledge production. Over three monthly zoom sessions in September, October and November, Pierre led 20 - 40 participants through several of her essays on Haiti, anthropology and racialization in Africa as well as her book, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (2012). Participants were based all over the globe. As well as the US and the South Africa, attendees came from the UK, India, the Congo, and other African countries. Registered participants were sent and asked to engage with the set readings in advance of each session. (For access to the readings and session recordings click here.) In late November to December 2021, RGC held its first Global Blackness Summer School. This summer school will be part of a series of Summer Schools that will be held each year at that time.The Global Blackness Summer Schools are an attempt to engage
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