UNC Greensboro professor to give annual Maxwell-Roddey Lecture

Tara Green, professor and director of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNC Greensboro, will deliver the 10th annual Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Africana Lecture at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Cone University Center, McKnight Hall.

Green’s presentation is entitled, “’They Saw Everything That Was Going to Happen’: Remembering the Middle Passage in Black Artistic Expressions of Resistance.” According to Green, two centuries after the last ship with enslaved persons sailed to the Americas, people of African descent remain haunted by forced engagement with the Atlantic, especially the leg of the journey known as the Middle Passage. In her lecture, Green will examine how the metaphor and lived experience of the Middle Passage are being deployed by black artists to inform and shape contemporary concerns, including Black Lives Matter, social inequality, assault on civil liberty, institutional efforts to suppress minority votes and debates over ethical behavior in governance and leadership.

A graduate of Dillard University, Green completed a master’s degree and Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University. She is the author of “A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men,” winner of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies. The work focuses on the impact of fatherlessness from the perspectives of Barack Obama and other black men. Her most recent book is “Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television and Song.”

The Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Africana Lecture honors its namesake for her pioneering contributions to the development of Africana Studies as an academic discipline at UNC Charlotte as the department’s founding chair; she also spearheaded the establishment of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) and co-founded Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture).