Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions
A lecture by Dr. Paula Marie Seniors, with Safiya Bandele performing "Warrior Woman-Spoken Word inspired by Mae Mallory."
Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2019
Time: 2:15–3:30 p.m.
Location: Occidental Lounge, Student Center, Brooklyn College
Paula Marie Seniors
Paula Marie Seniors is an associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech and the biographer of her family's legacy in her forthcoming book, Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (1956–1987), University of Georgia Press. Seniors won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, from the Association of Black Women Historians, for Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity and Politics in Black Musical Theater, Ohio State University Press, 2009. She co-edited Michelle Obama's Impact on African American Women and Girls, Palgrave MacMillan, and wrote "Reconfiguring Black Motherhood: Michelle Obama and the 'Mom in Charge Trope,'" which appears in the book. She published "Bob Cole's 'Colored Man's Declaration of Independence and Black Broadway: The Case of Cole' and Johnson's Shoo Fly Regiment and George C. Wolfe's Shuffle Along," Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, 2018; "Mae Mallory" and "The Monroe Defense Committee," Black Power Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing, 2018; "Mae Mallory and the Southern Belle Fantasy Trope," From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help, Palgrave (2014); and "Most Influential Black Artists in Musical Theatre," Virginia Tech Magazine, January 2016. In addition to her Mae Mallory book, Seniors is working on Michelle Obama's Silence: Police and State Violence Against African American Girls and Women.
Safiya Ellis Bandele
Safiya Ellis Bandele is director emeritus of the Center for Women's Development at Medgar Evers College (CUNY). During her 34-year tenure at Medgar Evers, she also assisted in developing and taught gender-specific curricula and facilitated "Women's Empowerment" workshops in community social service organizations, women's shelters, and prisons. Post-retirement (2011), Bandele performs her multi-media presentation on Ida B. Wells-Barnett: educator, lynching abolitionist, journalist and women's rights advocate. Using narration, dance/movement, song, and images, Bandele has presented the significance of this "Warrior for Justice" in local and national venues, including a highly acclaimed performance in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the birthplace of Wells. Bandele's writings on mass incarceration, women's trauma/redemption, and the efficacy of performance art were published in the online magazine In The Fray, the literary journal And Then, and the print anthology Love Lives Here Too, published by Resilience Media. Reading/performance venues include: SUNY; the National Black Theater (Harlem, New York); Rust College (Mississippi); Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. (Brooklyn, New York), and Hampton Roads (Hampton,Virginia) Her video "Safiya Bandele Mass Incarceration" is on YouTube.
