Monday, Jan. 19

10:45 a.m. in Clifton Daggett Gray Athletic Building

Welcome and musical selections.

Noted Haitian scholar Alex Dupuy, professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Wesleyan University, is the keynote speaker for the 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at Bates College.

Dupuy delivers his 10:45 a.m. keynote address, "Toussaint L'Overture and the Haitian Revolution: Race and Class Questions in the Americas." The United States opposed Haitian independence until 1888 when it established diplomatic relations with the island nation, finally dispatching abolitionist Frederick Douglass as its first ambassador one year later. The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s drew on the legacy of Toussaint L'Overture, hero of the Haitian revolution and an icon of liberation for the newly independent countries of Africa.
 
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and a citizen of the United States, Dupuy is the author of Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (HarperCollins, 1997), and Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (Latin American Perspective Series, 1989).  He is a widely published sociologist who studies theories of development and social change in the Caribbean; migration, race and ethnicity; and the processes of identity formation and political mobilization among Third World immigrants. Dupuy often provides commentary on Haitian current events for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio.

Dupuy served as a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at North Dartmouth from 1979 to 1982, when he joined the faculty at Wesleyan. He received his doctorate from the State University of New York at Binghamton, his M.A. from Brandeis University and his B.A. from the University of Connecticut at Storrs.