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Symposium: “King’s Revolutionary/Evolutionary Dream” and “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Cosmopolitanism: Afro-Asian Solidarity, Decoloniality, and Third-World Consciousness”
Back to Beloved Community Faculty Scholarship Symposium (Overview of Offerings)
Mulva Library, First Floor
100 Grant Street, De Pere, WI 54115, United States
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Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount.
David Poister (Chemistry) presents “King’s Revolutionary/Evolutionary Dream”
This talk will examine King’s religiously based campaign for racial justice through the lens of human evolution. Using a science-informed theology approach, King’s call for unification will be interpreted as a continuation of the evolutionary processes of aggregation and cooperation that have generated complexity in biological systems and have driven human progress. The importance of viewing King’s message in an evolutionary light will be discussed.
Anh Sy Huy Le (History) presents “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Cosmopolitanism: Afro-Asian Solidarity, Decoloniality, and Third-World Consciousness”
It is often overlooked how the American Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements in the United States took place in the intertwined context of a shifting world order rooted in the gradual collapses of European empires in Asia and Africa, the beginning of the Cold War, and violent decolonization across the Global South. This lecture explores the cosmopolitan legacies of Dr. King’s as part of a global intellectual history of anti-colonial praxes and progressive revolts against racial and capitalist oppressions. It will highlight how the emergence of a shared global consciousness of racial injustice during World War II and the postcolonial fights for equality—what historian Nico Slate terms “colored cosmopolitanism”—shaped Dr. King’s political activism and how they, in turn, generated new radical forms of cross-ethnic solidarity and movements in the United States from the 1960s to the present.