Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

09/15/2026

"How a 'Civil Rights' Organization Turns Against Social Justice Movements: The ADL in Context"

-> Book talks with Emmaia Gelman, author of _The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State_ (UC Press)

Two events:
1) At UNC-Chapel Hill

Wed. 9/23 5:30-7:00 pm

FedEx Global Education Center, room 1005
301 Pittsboro St
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Free parking after 5 pm

2) At Duke

Th. 9/24 5:00-6:30 pm

Smith Warehouse, Bay 4
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall
114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Durham, NC 27701
Parking info: fhi.duke.edu/about/find-us/

About the book:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.

This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.

Read more about the book here: https://emmaiagelman.com/books/

Co-sponsored at Duke by John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke Universityr, and Program in International Comparative Studies at Duke University

09/15/2026

Our programming around the Declaration of Independence at Durham County Main Library continues on Tuesday (Sept. 15) with "The American Revolution at 250: Historians Discuss the Many Worlds of 1776" at 6 p.m.

Famously, in December 1773, over a hundred colonists snuck onto ships in Boston Harbor after nightfall, destroying chests of tea worth nearly $2 million today. Often portrayed as a local tax protest that helped spark a Revolution, this event raises all kinds of questions: How did others elsewhere in America and across the world see such an affair? Why were the protesters dressed as Native Americans? Where did all that tea come from in the first place?

The “Boston Tea Party” was just one example of the many ways in which the American Revolution was a global phenomenon, whose causes and consequences reached from India and China to Indigenous nations across the North American continent.

Join us as Duke historians Adriane Lentz-Smith and Philip Stern launch a year of discussions on these many different “Worlds of 1776,” in conversation with UNC historian Kathleen DuVal, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.

Brought to you by Duke We the People: A Duke & Durham Initiative; the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; and the Duke University Department of History’s 2026-2027 program on the “Worlds of 1776.”

Sponsored by the Triangle Early American History Seminar.

09/15/2026

09/10/2026

You are invited to a film screening and discussion with Tara Moore, the director of the 2025 Oscar® Long-Listed documentary "Legacy: Apartheid's Shadow." The film offers a history of apartheid and of the anti-apartheid movement, but also brings the conversation into the contemporary divisions that persist in South Africa, as well as what it means to be white and privileged in South Africa.

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, Room B189
Free and open to the public

09/09/2026

What can visual culture reveal about the making of a nation and an empire?

Join the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Duke University Libraries for our next Faculty Bookwatch, celebrating Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History Gennifer Weisenfeld’s remarkable body of scholarship on modern Japan.

🗓️ When: Thursday, September 17, 2026 5PM
🌐 Where: Rubenstein Library 153
🖋️ RSVP: https://duke.is/BookwatchFall2026

The conversation will highlight her newest book, The Fine Art of Persuasion, alongside The Complete Commercial Artist and Gas Mask Nation. Each work explores the powerful connections between visual culture, identity, politics, nation-building, and empire.

Weisenfeld will be joined by distinguished scholars Leo Ching, Christine M. E. Guth, Simon Partner, and Benjamin Uchiyama, with Ranji Khanna moderating.

09/04/2026

Two special screenings of "I Love Boosters" with filmmaker Boots Riley in person:

1:30pm screening of "I Love Boosters"
(Boots Riley, 2026, 105 min, USA, English and Mandarin with English subtitles, DCP)
-- Panel Discussion to follow with writer/director Boots Riley, in conversation with Prof. Franklin Cason (Cinematic Arts/AAHVS), Prof. Michael Hardt (Literature), and Prof. Kathi Weeks (Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies)

7:00pm screening of "I Love Boosters"
-- Followed by Q&A with writer/director Boots Riley

Free parking for this event will be available in the Campus Drive Lot (across the street from the Rubenstein Arts Center, on Anderson St.)

Limited space available, seating will be first come, first served. Doors open 30 min. before show-time.
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ABOUT THE FILM:
booster (n.) — someone who illicitly procures goods from a store and sells them at a discount price

Within the aisles of the languishing department stores of Oakland, California, where the townspeople themselves can’t afford to step through the front doors, Corvette (Keke Palmer) has a scheme. She and her crew are entering these places, fly but broke, and skittering off with the loot: racks of high-fashion clothing made by the exalted designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore) that they’ll redistribute to the masses on the cheap. Call it community service.

Corvette wants to be like Christie, an artist who creates these beautiful and daring garments. But the closest she can get to Christie’s world is only in disguise, and never long enough to keep her feet planted on solid ground. So the alternative is simple: if you can’t access it, then steal it. But boosting through the Bay eventually leads Corvette on a consciousness-splitting adventure into new dimensions — and perhaps another way of seeing where she belongs in a bizarre world.

From the mad mind of Boots Riley (?Sorry to Bother You"; "I’m a Virgo") comes "I Love Boosters", an electric, mind-bending odyssey through the world of high-fashion and low-rent economies. An outrageously outré vision, Riley’s sophomore feature takes us from the malls of Oakland to the factories of China, as Corvette and her fellow boosters, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), steal their way into a surrealist fantasia that confirms the auteur as an utterly singular voice in contemporary cinema. Provided courtesy of Neon. Rated R.

"Bursting with eye-popping visuals and razor-sharp social commentary, I LOVE BOOSTERS is a brash, hilarious, and wholly unexpected joyride of friendship and style." -- Jessie Fairbanks, SIFF

"The film is as stylish as it is humorous and radical. And ultimately, [director Boots Riley] hopes it sparks something beyond the screen: 'I want you to engage with it as a piece of art and come to some conclusions, and hopefully it inspires you to go out and help make a mass, militant, radical labor movement… We need to try to get control of the wealth we have created with our labor.'" -- Jessica Herndon, Sundance Institute

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ABOUT THE FILMMAKER:

"Boots Riley is a walking contradiction like bullets and love mixin. Slurs his words with perfect diction, he's guilty of his convictions. Complicated compositions, punctuated propositions, it's tenacious two-stops, cinema with ambition. Make you rev your transmission, in the intersection twistin - when the Henny hits the ground, sidewalks will be christened. He's so nervous and sweaty, that the g*t might slip out his hand. A homeless dude need a tip in his can (he put his bid in this, man. Now it's just bitterness, man). We need a bid-ness plan [a plan on how to change our economic system] , he's not just spittin at fans. When he's runnin from the police, he don't have to rush - he's so dope he just jumps in the toilet and flush. We cut it, boil it and hush, aluminum foil it and such - tryin to catch the few bucks, the big boys didn't clutch. We use the tweezers for crutch, when we done burned down the dutch, but when they Starsky & Hutch, we just s**t out of luck."

Boots Riley is a rapper, songwriter, record producer, filmmaker, and activist whose work operates at the intersection of art and radical politics. Riley studied film at San Francisco State University before gaining recognition as the frontman of hip-hop groups The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. Vibe Magazine named Riley one of the 10 most influential people of the year.
Riley's activism is central to his identity. In the same year he co-founded The Coup, he and other activists and hip-hop artists created the Mau Mau Rhythm Collective, which organized Hip-Hop Edutainment Concerts in alliance with community-based organizations such as Women's Economic Agenda Project, Copwatch, the Black Panther Alumni Association, and various anti-police brutality projects. Riley was involved with the Occupy Oakland movement and was a leader of the activist group The Young Comrades.

Riley made his directorial debut with the film SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, an American science fiction black comedy that he wrote and directed. Riley described the film as "an absurdist dark comedy with aspects of magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing," drawing from his own experiences. The feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was acquired by Annapurna Pictures, and achieved box office success and critical acclaim. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Riley won the Best First Feature Award for Sorry to Bother You and received SFFILM's Kanbar Award.

Riley followed his feature debut by creating the television series I'M A VIRGO, a seven-episode surrealist comedy that premiered at South by Southwest and was released on Amazon Prime Video. I'M A VIRGO was nominated for a Gotham Award and four Independent Spirit Awards.

Riley also wrote and directed I LOVE BOOSTERS, a crime comedy starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival and was released theatrically in the United States by Neon.

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Sponsored by Duke Cinematic Arts, Experimental Film Lab at Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke UniversityHI, Dept. of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation.

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Event URL:

1:30pm screening:
https://cinematicarts.duke.edu/screensociety/screenings/i-love-boosters-2026-panel-discussion-w-dir-boots-riley

7pm screening: https://cinematicarts.duke.edu/screensociety/screenings/i-love-boosters-2026-qa-w-dir-boots-riley

View trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1xZegSgN8w
Screen/Society screenings are free and open to the public.
Parking Info: https://artscenter.duke.edu/parking

09/02/2026

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) was a prolific cultural theorist and literary critic known for his unflinching analysis of fascism steeped in his own Neo-Marxist theoretical framework. This panel follows the relevance of Jameson’s writings on globalization for the present political moment where a resurgence of far-right actors is leading to a new stage of late fascism.

09/02/2026

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) was a prolific cultural theorist and literary critic known for his unflinching analysis of fascism steeped in his own Neo-Marxist theoretical framework. This panel follows the relevance of Jameson's writings on globalization for the present political moment where a resurgence of far-right actors is leading to a new stage of late fascism.
Discussants include:
• Ryan Kerr of Broward College
• Suvij Sudershan from Yale University
• Jini Kim Watson of New York University
Chairs: Duke post-doctoral students Yubeen Lim & Carson Welch

Fredric Jameson was a prolific cultural theorist and literary criti...

09/01/2026

🖼️ What do we mean when we talk about “the humanities”? And how has the way we describe their value changed over time?

Over the course of a four-part series this past spring, faculty at Duke approached the question from another direction. They considered what becomes possible when we learn to look more carefully at the world around us—at the stories we inherit, the technologies we build, the landscapes we inhabit and the people whose experiences can disappear from view.

The series, a collaboration between Duke Alumni Lifelong Learning and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, brought faculty together for conversations about technology, environmental change, archives, human rights, history and the ways people understand one another. The subjects varied considerably.

The questions underneath them did not. Read more here:
https://fhi.duke.edu/news/how-weve-come-talk-about-humanities/

08/26/2026

Join author and scholar Najha Zigbi-Johnson for a gallery talk exploring Mapping Malcolm in conversation with the exhibition, Turn the volume up! Moderated by Durham-based artist Marcella Zigbuo Camara, the discussion will examine how artists, writers, and cultural thinkers engage questions of place, memory, identity, resistance, and collective liberation.

Visitors are invited to engage with the exhibition through the lens of Mapping Malcolm, discovering unexpected connections between contemporary artistic practice and the enduring legacy of Malcolm X.

Location: Nasher Museum of Art

Date: August 29, 12-2pm

Mapping Malcolm (Columbia UP, 2024) continues the project of reinscribing Malcolm X’s memory and legacy in the present by exploring his commitment to community building and his articulation of a global power analysis as it continues to manifest across New York City today. More specifically, the book explores the limits and possibilities of the archive, the political, material, and philosophical legacy of the Black radical tradition, the Black diaspora, and the state. Oriented toward sovereignty and liberation, Mapping Malcolm brings together artists, community organizers, and scholars to consider the politics of Black space-making in Harlem through a range of historical, cultural, and anti-imperialist worldviews designed to offer new, reparatory pedagogical possibilities.

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is a writer and cultural organizer. Her Harlem-based practice explores the intersections of contemporary Black art, the built environment, and social movements. She is the editor of Mapping Malcolm (2024), a transdisciplinary publication that brings together artists, community organizers, and scholars to consider the politics of Black space-making in Harlem and across the diasporic world. Najha is a graduate of Guilford College and Harvard Divinity School, and was subsequently a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture Preservation and Planning at Columbia University. Currently, Najha’s work explores how Black political movements give way to cultural production and institution building. This ongoing inquiry is shaped by her roles lecturing in architecture and political science at the City College of New York, her curatorial work, and her writing practice. Najha’s work has been published by New York Magazine, Artforum, SEEN Journal, Essence, White Cube Gallery, and more.