Malcolm X Conference and Festival

"Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world."  Malcolm X

The Annual Malcolm X Conference and Festival at the University of Nebraska at Omaha brings to Omaha an academic, artistic, and aesthetic forum to explore and expand awareness of the African and African-American communities about which Malcolm (El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) was intimately concerned and for which he worked. In doing so we hope to continue to acknowledge the significance of his critical perspective on global and local society to the United States and to the larger global community.

Born in Omaha, Malcolm X embodied in his personal biography, change, growth, and transcendence and his life has become for many a model of human potential and possibility. The Conference and Festival will bring together scholars, artists, and students to continue the important process of deconstructive dialogues about social relations of power and oppression and the various other issues that Malcolm brought to the forefront of the world.

2013 CONFERENCE THEME:

The UNO Department of Black Studies is developing this year’s 12th annual Malcolm X Conference is being developed around the theme “It’s Not Where You From It’s Where You’re At”: Space, Place, and Time in the African-American Experience

Questions of space, place, and time affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Conflicts begin and are sustained on contestation of both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against “others” constructed as lived landscapes of division and disenfranchisement; and ideology constructs identities based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts, through the art of reconstruction of  known spaces and in establishing relationships between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as are the relationships between visibility and invisibility. This conference seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place as they relate to the African-American experience.

Click here for the official website of Malcolm X.