An analyst from the National Security Archive and scholars from Duke and New York universities take part in the Bates College symposium Latin American Revolutions in afternoon and evening sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, March 9 and 10.

Hosted by the Latin American studies faculty, with support from the Mellon Innovation Fund, the symposium is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Sibylle Fischer, associate professor and chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University, offers the lecture Haiti and the Revolutions in Spanish America at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

At 7:30 p.m. that day, Jocelyn Olcott, associate professor of history at Duke University, gives a talk titled Soldiers, Suffragists and Sex Radicals: Women, Gender and the Mexican Revolution, also in Carnegie 204.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who directs the archive’s Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects, presents the lecture The Cuban Revolution: 50 Years of Bedeviling U.S. Foreign Policy at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Concluding the symposium is a roundtable discussion with the three guest speakers on the theme Latin America’s Many Revolutions at 7:30 p.m. that day, also in the Keck Classroom.

Fischer’s scholarship covers, among other areas, Caribbean and Latin American literatures in Spanish, Portuguese and French; 19th-century culture and politics; the intersections of literature, dictatorship and philosophy; and the Black Atlantic.

Olcott researches the feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Duke University Press, 2005) explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is also a co-editor of “Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico” (Duke University Press, 2006).

Olcott is working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, under contract with Oxford University Press; and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. She is also developing a long-term project on the labor, political and conceptual history of motherhood in 20th-century Mexico.

The National Security Archive is an independent, nongovernmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. Kornbluh was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director of the archive’s project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Through the 1990s, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs.

He is the author, editor or co-editor of several National Security Archive books, including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (The New Press, 1998) and The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2004), which the Los Angeles Times selected as a “best book of the year.”

Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other journals and newspapers. He has appeared on national broadcasts including 60 Minutes, The Charlie Rose Show, Nightline, All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has also worked on and appeared in numerous documentary films, including the Oscar-winning Panama Deception.

With the help of one of this year’s major grants from The Creative Capital – Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program, Beasley will soon make that knowledge more widely available through a new book he’s completing.

“The book situates artists as cultural workers and theorists of contemporary cultural politics,” Beasley says. “It will be a mix of ethnography, anthropology, art and politics.” His goal is to create a cross-over text that has the integrity of an academic publication and the accessibility and visual imagery of an art book for general readers.

According to the Warhol Foundation, the grant of more than $35,000 is “designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jill Reich, Bates Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, said, “Professor Beasley is one of those scholars whose work is both authoritative and accessible, making it of great value to other scholars and the public alike. He demonstrates the relevance and importance of research in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as how those fields are interrelated. We at Bates are delighted with the recognition of his talents through this award and the support it will provide for making his work more widely available.”

Beasley says that the book will include references to artists from the Central African Republic to the United States, but a major part of the book — tentatively titled Reciting Sites: Rituals, Death and Loss — will focus on his years of research in Haiti.

“I have not met a person that went to Haiti who has not been moved one way or another,” he says.

While the world focuses on Haiti’s enduring material poverty, Beasley sees a special kind of wealth in Haitian expressions of art and culture. As an example, he points to the artists of the Grand Rue: “In an old junkyard in the center of Port-au-Prince, they make these magnificent sculptures out of debris and junk that we’ve dumped in Haiti. On one level you can say, ‘Oh how cute, they are making do with what they have.’ But on another it’s ‘Hold on, they are actually making this huge social critique about consumption, and about how we are treating “non-developed” worlds.’

In December 2009, Beasley curated the first Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince. Sculptors of the Grand Rue served as hosts of Ghetto Biennale. They sent invitations worldwide to fine artists, filmmakers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers, asking them to come to the Grand Rue “to make or witness work that will be shown or happen in their neighborhood.”

Beasley left Haiti three days before the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. “I just wrote a piece about my return to Haiti after the earthquake,” he says. “I think probably the most haunting thing for me was looking for people in places that no longer existed.” [SEE VIDEO]

On his website, Beasley describes his research as “in the realms of intercultural performance, a paradigm that critique, explore and interrogate the theories of human communication with special attention to the oral performance of narrative and cross cultural engagement. My over-arching research questions concern the transference/performance of indigenous ritual and shamanistic practices from Africa to distinct communities in the western hemisphere. I consider the performances of traditional ritual practices in contemporary society as more than just spiritual and mystical performative acts; rather ritual is a vehicle by which one can extrapolate (both political and religious) meaning in the contemporary world. Through the use of ethnographic methodologies my work reveals a glimpse of the complexities of human social interaction through ritual performance.”

Professor Beasley’s publication in the journal Performance Research: “Vodou, Penises and Bones: Ritual performances of death and eroticism in the cemetery and the junk yard of Port-au-Prince” Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2010, pages 41-47

Sponsored by the Multicultural Affairs office and the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information please call 207-786-8376.

Louis will speak about the current relief efforts and needs faced by Cité Soleil, one of the poorest Haitian communities devastated by the quake. Louis, formerly a teacher, is Cité Soleil’s first mayor. Prior to his election, in 2006, Cité Soleil was treated as a constituent part of Port-au-Prince.

Through Louis’ leadership, Cité Soleil has become a distinct political entity within the capital, because of both its size and its urgent community needs. In addition to the recent devastation in Haiti, Cité Soleil has faced gang violence, lack of job opportunities, a low literacy rate and a high incidence of HIV/AIDS.

Most of Cité Soleil’s estimated 500,000 residents live in extreme poverty, and the area was heavily affected by the January quake. Cité Soleil did not receive significant food aid until nearly two weeks after the earthquake, and the area remains in desperate need of help, according to World Emergency Relief.

In the period following the quake, Louis told the Los Angeles Times, residents of Cité Soleil “have not received any assistance. No food, no medical help. Poor people have dignity and they should be treated with dignity.”

Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker Barbara Savage at the podium in the Olin Concert Hall.

“Can we keep the faith when our dreams are imperfectly realized? I hope that we can.”

Monday was an especially fitting day for this question posed by historian Barbara Savage as she concluded her keynote speech for Bates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances. The unifying theme for this year’s day of special programs was “Faith and Ethics in the Public Sphere: What is the Dream?” Savage’s address looked hard at a dream that Benjamin Mays ’20, the theologian, mentor to King and civil rights leader, had all his life: that the church could model integration for U.S. society at large.

Mays’ dream was not realized, leading to Savage’s expression of hope for faith’s power of endurance. That sentiment would resonate under any circumstances, but on this snowy Monday at Bates, where everyone was sobered by the tragedy of the Haitian earthquake, Savage’s closing was especially poignant.

Haiti, in fact, claimed an unbilled spot on the keynote presentation agenda, which was attended by about 200 people in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall and opened by music from the Bates Jazz Band. Sophomore Eric Mathieu, who lives in New York state but has relatives in Haiti, made an appeal for disaster relief funds

• Read student impressions of King Day programming at Bates.
• See a multimedia presentation about Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2010 at Bates:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Amandla! sponsored the workshop “21st-Century African American Leadership.”

Savage, a historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke after remarks by Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen and Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich. Titled “Benjamin Mays and the Politics of Black Religion in the Age of Desegregation,” Savage’s address used Mays to illustrate some of the historic forces that helped shape, and constrain, the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

Inspired, in part, by extensive travels abroad, Mays believed that a racially integrated American Christian church could point the way to integration in the political and social spheres as well. Savage showed how Mays’ encounters with theologians and philosophers outside the U.S. — Gandhi, Muslim critics of Christianity, the would-be utopians of the 1937 Oxford Conference — shaped and annealed this ideal.

As a Southern, black, religious liberal, Savage explained, Mays had a complex case of the kind of “multiple consciousness” developed by people who live in worlds that do not overlap. “Perhaps the advantage of a multiple consciousness is a learned aptitude for abiding with irreconcilable contradictions,” she noted.

So even as Mays witnessed and advocated for a worldwide religious movement for social justice and racial integration, he understood that churches in the United States — which above all express the attitudes of their parishioners, both black and white — might stubbornly choose to remain segregated.

“He argued that Christianity ought to be color-blind and desegregated,” Savage said, “while at the same time he adhered to a belief in the political necessity of black-controlled institutions, especially churches and colleges.”

Ultimately, the contradictions prevailed. If the 1960s offered “a glimpse of the possibility of realization” of Mays’ dreams and ideals, Savage said, the last years of his life were marked mostly with personal disappointment and disillusionment about the goal of integration, especially in terms of black cultural and political identity. The trouble with integration, he told one audience, is that “it always moved from black to white and never from white to black.”

Citing Martin Luther King’s observation that among churchgoing Americans, 11 o’clock Sunday morning remains the “most segregated hour in this nation,” Savage noted that the ” ‘race church’ remains a fact of American life” and Mays’ “search for a progressive politics of religious globalism remains as elusive as during his long life.”

So if Mays’ adherence to these ideals represents a particularly American optimism, a faith in democracy and progress, as Savage suggested, this chapter of Mays’ story is nevertheless more of a cautionary tale.

As she said in her conclusion, “All of this is evidence of the necessity to shift and rethink our own dreams and our own ideas, and to realize that dreams are often incompletely and imperfectly realized.”

When a sailing ship carrying 22 college students on an educational voyage in early March rescued 49 Haitians from their disabled vessel, a Bates sophomore was right in the middle of the widely reported story.

Doing an off-campus study program with the Sea Education Association, G. Carl Noblitt IV was the junior watch officer aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer who first sighted the Haitian sailboat on March 9. And when the Cramer carried the Haitians to Jamaica, their original destination, it was Noblitt who steered the 134-foot brigantine into Port Antonio.

The Haitians, later quoted in a Jamaican newspaper as hoping to find better living conditions in Jamaica, had been at sea for five days when Noblitt’s ship encountered them. With no rescue services within easy range and the Haitians — more than a dozen of whom were children — out of food and water, there was no question of leaving them to their own devices, says Noblitt, of Boxford, Mass.

“We just realized, ‘Man, these are lives that we don’t want to lose,’” he says. “And the fact that they actually piled themselves into a boat to make a better life for themselves — man, there was a lot of drive in them.”

Coming from 10 states and 18 colleges or universities including Bates, Noblitt and his fellow students were aboard the Cramer for the SEA Semester, a challenging interdisciplinary program that follows six weeks in the classroom with six at sea. The students and the vessel’s crew of 11 were in the fifth week of their voyage, which concluded in Key West on March 19.

The ship was riding at anchor while students and the ship’s science staff took core samples from the Caribbean floor. Noblitt was midway through his watch when he sighted the Haitian vessel slowly approaching. What at first appeared to be a routine encounter — ships passing at mid-morning, so to speak — soon took on a different aspect.

“We were a little nervous, having a preconception about pirates from our classes,” says Noblitt. “We saw only men at first, because they were protecting the women in the middle of the boat. And then we realized they were in need.”

The Haitian boat, barely large enough for its occupants and under oar power, drew closer and closer to the Cramer, which was immobilized by its deployed sampling gear. The Haitian boat finally brushed the larger vessel’s bowsprit, knocking down what was left of its mast.

By then, the situation was becoming clear through communications shouted between the vessels. Only one person aboard the Cramer, a student, spoke French well enough to talk in any detail with the Haitians. Neither U.S. nor Jamaican maritime authorities were able to get rescue vessels to the scene quickly, and in radio consultation with them, medical advisers and the SEA headquarters in Woods Hole, Mass., the Cramer’s Captain Steve Tarrant decided to bring the Haitians aboard and carry them to Jamaica.

The Americans accommodated the group at the bow, jury-rigging a head and providing food, beverages and blankets. “It really shocked everyone to see the young children, the babies in arms,” Noblitt says.

Under both sail and motor power, the 18-year-old Spanish-built Cramer finally made port around 2 a.m., with Noblitt at the wheel. Among both the Americans and their guests, “there was an intensity in the air as we approached Jamaica,” he says.

The following day, the Kingston newspaper Jamaica Observer reported that the Cramer group brought to 268 the year’s total of Haitians arriving by boat in Jamaica, fleeing the political chaos and bleak economic prospects at home.

The paper, which counted two more Haitians among the rescued than did SEA, reported the group’s makeup as 17 children between the ages of 1 and 8, eight women and 26 men, of which two women and three men are returnees who were sent back to Haiti last year. Pronounced in “good physical condition” by medical authorities, the refugees were sent to join other Haitian refugees in temporary quarters before sending them to a larger holding facility pending resolution of their cases.

For Noblitt and his peers on the Corwith Cramer, the episode was eye-opening. “We get the stories in the papers and so forth about these particular rescues,” he says. “But a lot of other boats have gone down and haven’t had the rescues, and that’s something we all were discussing and thinking about on the boat.”

Because of the core-sampling gear that kept the Cramer stationary, “we were actually put in the position that they were going to come to us no matter what,” he says. “And we felt there was a significance to that.”

Regis will speak about his field experience in Haiti and Mississippi and read his poetry. A reception will follow.Regis is the author of a book of poetry Haiti Through My Eyes and a photographic documentary Deadly Road to Democracy, both published by Jukejoint Press.

The exhibit will run through Feb. 23, 2001. For more information, call 207-786-6158.