How does storytelling resist injustice? What happens when modernization becomes a project of erasure, displacing communities, reshaping identity, and silencing language?

Join us for From Empire to Erasure: The View from Mediterranean Africa with Professor Vaughn Rasberry. This event explores the power of memory as a form of resistance in North Africa, particularly in moments of political upheaval, post-colonialism, and forced displacement. Through a discussion of modernity, language, and memory, including the histories of Nubian displacement and Amazigh revival, Professor Rasberry will guide us in examining how literature and memory confront oppression and preserve what systems of power attempt to erase.

We invite you to reflect on the role of storytelling in reclaiming identity through remembrance, resistance, and revival.

Vaughn Rasberry is a Stanford professor of English and African & African American Studies whose work examines African diaspora literature, postcolonial theory, and modernity. He is the award-winning author of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination.

The event will be moderated by the Abbasi-Markaz 25-26 Fellow Ameera Eshtewi.