IHGC Fellow, Chris Gratien, welcomes Professor Amanda Joyce Hall:

A paradigmatic fight against worldwide formations of racial injustice, the Global anti-Apartheid movement shook the foundations of South Africa’s Apartheid regime. In contrast to existing accounts that largely depict anti-Apartheid as a phenomenon of White solidarity, this talk offers the framework of “shantytown solidarities” to describe how South African students, writers, and organizers grew a trans-continental movement, built coalitions in tension, and amassed political power across racial, ethnic, and class divisions throughout the Black world. It positions anti-Apartheid as a radical, anti-colonial struggle grounded in the politics of call-and-response—referring to how Black activists in Jamaica and African America used global-local organizing to challenge Apartheid in South Africa and parallel manifestations of Apartheid in their own spaces of politics, education, and popular culture.

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Amanda Joyce Hall is a historian of twentieth-century social movements with a specialization in Black internationalism, transnational movements, and radical organizing throughout North America, Africa, and the broader Black world. Hall's research interests include conceptual and political histories of anti-apartheid, decolonization, African diaspora, Blackness and Black consciousness, anti-colonialism, and abolition.

Hall completed her doctorate in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2022 where she was awarded the Sylvia Ardyn Boone prize for best dissertation in African and African American art and culture. Hall was formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University, a dissertation fellow in UCSB’s Department of Black Studies, and a History Workshop fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.  She holds master’s degrees in International and World History from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and in Education from Fordham University in New York City.

*PLEASE NOTE: The 11:30am start time reflects a time change from the originally advertised time of 4pm.