Lecture: “Detroit vs. Every (Body)”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Transformation in a Modern American City, 1870-2016 – Kyle T. Mays. 

Please join the Detroit School Series for a lecture by Kyle T. Mays an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies, the American Indian Studies Center, and the Department of History at UCLA and a scholar of Afro-Indigenous Studies, Indigenous popular culture, and urban history/studies. In this lecture, Mays will draw from his recent book manuscript on dispossession, settler colonialism, and indigeneity in Detroit, “Detroit vs. Every (Body)”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Transformation in a Modern American City, 1870-2016. This talk will center on three questions. First, what is the relationship between modern urban development and Indigenous peoples? Second, what are the links between blackness and indigeneity? Third, how might the processes of colonialism and racialization help us to understand an urban indigeneity historically and going forward? Using the concept of dispossession and what radical geographer Ananya Roy calls ‘racial banishment,’ Mays argues that modern cities have developed through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and settlers’ ideas of them. At the same time, Indigenous peoples have resisted their dispossession through activism and expressive culture, especially through their engagement with Black people and blackness. Finally, this talk will offer preliminary thoughts on what a ‘New Urban Indigenous Studies” might look like.

This lecture is generously supported by the “Learning from Detroit Fund” in the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies.

Friday, February 14th, from 4:15 – 6:00 PM
LMichigan League – Kalamazoo Room, 2nd Floor (911 N. University, Ann Arbor, 48109)


Lecture: Building Black and Brown People Power In Detroit –Branden Snyder. Join the Detroit School Series for the 2019-2020 school year kick-off lecture, proudly hosted in Detroit! This year, speakers will interrogate and reimagine the theme: Egalitarian Detroit. In this first lecture, Branden Snyder, Executive Director of Detroit Action (formerly Good Jobs Now) will construct a radical vision of Detroit’s future that re-centers the legacy of Black culture and history in economic and urban development of the city. Snyder will share Detroit Action’s work on civic engagement and collective mobilization in Detroit, and how the organization translates what they learn through grassroots organizing into a comprehensive and complex policy agenda.  Come learn about what community organizing is, the state of affairs in Michigan and how communities are using policy and electoral organizing to change their neighborhoods.

Friday, September 20th, 2019, from 4:15 – 6:00PM

University of Michigan Detroit Center (3663 Woodward Ave, Detroit, Michigan 48201)