[ Ссылка ] Gina Dent, Angela Davis and Manthia Diawara, Professors of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. August 3rd, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.

Dent is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the same university, she previously worked as Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research and as Principal Investigator for the UC Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice. Dent obtained her doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. In 1998, she was the editor of Black Popular Culture. Her research interests revolve around race, feminism, legal theory, and popular culture. She has two forthcoming books: Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology and Prison as a Border and Other Essays.

Manthia Diawara is a writer, cultural theorist, film director, and scholar from Mali based in the United States. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema at New York University, where he also heads the Institute of African American Affairs and the Africana Studies Program.


Born in Mali's capital Bamako, Manthia Diawara spent his youth in Guinea until 1964 when his family was expelled from the country by the regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré. While attending graduate school in Bamako, Diawara became involved in a student group called “The Rockers” and began listening to music by James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Ike and Tina Turner. The group was opposed to the Vietnam War and apartheid and aligned itself with Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the Black Muslims. His heroes were Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. Diawara went on to study literature in France and subsequently moved to the United States, where he completed his doctorate at Indiana University in 1985. He then taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania, establishing the Africana Studies Program at NYU in 1992. In addition to founding the publishing house Black Renaissance, he is one of the leaders of the pressure group Transafrica —alongside the actors Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover and the novelist Walter Mosley —which supported the candidacy of Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States in 2008.

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist in the 1960s working with the Communist Party USA, of which she was a member until 1991, and was briefly involved in the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement.

After allegedly purchasing firearms used in the 1970 armed takeover of a Marin County, California courtroom, in which four people were killed, she was prosecuted for conspiracy. She was later acquitted of this charge.

Davis is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its History of Consciousness Department. She is also a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.

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