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Asmarina: Film and Discussion with Angela Davis, Medhin Paolos, and Lorgia García Peña [SOLD OUT]

Still from Asmarina (2015).

Film

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This event is sold out.

This documentary film about the habesha (Eritrean/Ethiopian community) of Milan, Italy, engages in historical disruption of the relationship between colonialism and diaspora. Interweaving testimonies of first- and second-generation habesha immigrants in Milan, archival research, photography, and music, the film brings to light Italian postcolonial heritage and its effects on present-day place of Italians of color, immigrants, and refugees. Asmarina has been shown in the Sole Luna Film Festival in Treviso, at the Museum Suriname in Amsterdam, at the Loving Festival in New Orleans, and at the Etnofilmfest in Monselice, Italy, among many other venues. It was the recipient of the Borderscapes Film Award (2016) and an award from the Festival del Cinema Africano, d’Asia e America Latina, in Milan (2015).

Angela Davis, distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has written on Asmarina, will introduce the film and participate in a discussion with filmmaker Medhin Paolos and Lorgia García Peña, the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, after the screening.

Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad. Over the years, she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of nine books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; The Angela Y. Davis Reader; and Are Prisons Obsolete?. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.

Medhin Paolos’s work is located at the intersection of art, social justice, and digital humanities research. She is co-founder of the Milano chapter of Rete G2 (Second Generation Network), a national organization that promotes the human and civil rights of children of immigrants in Italy. She is research scholar at Harvard University (2018) and co-director of the transnational digital humanities project Mind the Gap.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, the Inequality in America Initiative in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Harvard Art Museums.

The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway. Doors will open at 5:30 pm.

This program is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at noon on Tuesday, March 20, at the Harvard Box Office, located in Farkas Hall, 12 Holyoke St, Cambridge. Tickets must be picked up in person and are not available online or by phone. Limit of two tickets per person.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund.