This Falseworkshop--a day of study, with closing panel discussion--on W.E.B. Du Bois, native son of Great Barrington, focuses on Du Bois's global reach as a political thinker and activist, and reminds us how every local action must be understood in its international context. It is offered in preparation for the Town of Great Barrington’s celebration of Du Bois’s sesquicentennial in 2018, in partnership with Multicultural Bridge, and with the support of Bard College at Simon’s Rock. We seek to understand Du Bois's encounter with various anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements across the world, which informs bringing the US versions of settler colonialism and anti-black racism, and resistances to them, in conversation with others. We also want to think about what is bred in the silences about these constitutive connections between local and global struggles, and where else in the current moment do we find this repeated, in our various fields of work and impact. 

The day of study features close collaborative readings of works that also highlight the many genres of intellectual, cultural, and political production sported by Du Bois over the course of his expansive life, and will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Bill Mullen, Neil Roberts, Wesley Brown, Ciaran Finlayson, and Asma Abbas. Join Hic Rosa Collective and Falsework School to warm up for the upcoming season of commemorative celebration of W.E.B. Du Bois in Great Barrington!

(Registration fee for day of study: $60/sliding-scale $40/students & virtual participants $20; closing panel is free and open to the public)

Closing Panelists: 
Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Williams College, and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is author of numerous articles and essays, of the award-winning book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the collaborative work Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass,  in addition to editing several volumes. 

Bill Mullen is Professor of American Studies at Purdue University, and author of Afro-Orientalism (Minnesota, 2004), Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics 1935-1946 (University of Illinois, 1999), Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Temple, 2015),  and W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (Pluto, 2016).

Wesley Brown is Professor of Social Studies and the Arts at Bard College at Simon's Rock. He is the author of three novels, as well as three produced plays, and a recent collection of short stories Dance of the Infidels. He is the co-editor of a fiction multicultural anthology Imagining America and a nonfiction multicultural anthology Visions of America, and he is editor of The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. 

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer based in London. He is a graduate of the African American Studies program at Bard College at Simon's Rock and recently completed an MA in Aesthetics & Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University (UK).

Asma Abbas is Associate Professor of Politics and Philosophy at Bard College at Simon's Rock, associate faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and founding director of Hic Rosa Collective. She is the author of Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics (2010), and Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited (forthcoming).