Tuesday, February 25, 2025
6PM
Room 9206
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) presents:
Please join the Center for Place, Culture and Politics for a book talk featuring author Sónia Vaz Borges, who will discuss her recently published memoir, Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab, with poet and Chair in Urban Studies Celina Su. The event will take place on Tuesday, February 25, at 6PM in Room 9206 at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Jodi Melamed says of the book, “I can think of no other work that provides such deep insight into the lived intimacies of the afterlives of national liberation struggles and their diasporas. Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab is to be savored in stillness, discussed in study groups with comrades, and taught in classrooms where militant education for home-grown anticolonial liberation remains on the syllabus.”
Both Vaz Borges and Su are scholars, community organizers, and artists working across disciplines and modes. This promises to be a rich conversation about the relationship between academic and artistic practice, individual and communal histories of colonial displacement and anti-colonial resistance, and the practice of making and coming home.
Books will be available for purchase at the event.
This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Non-CUNY visitors must provide a government-issued photo ID upon entry. For more information, please see the Graduate Center Building Entry Policy.
Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and socialpolitical organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges coauthored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). Vaz Borges is also the author of the book Na Pó Di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, de Santa Filomena e da Encosta Nascente (2014), and editor of the Zines, Caderno Consciência e Resistência Negra (2007–2011). Vaz Borges is currently an Assistant Professor in the History and Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Vaz Borges continues to write on education and liberation struggles and is now working on her concept of the “walking archive.”
Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. Her work focuses on everyday struggles for collective governance; her current book project centering radical democracy, Budget Justice: Racial Solidarities & Politics From Below, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Celina has served on New York City’s participatory budgeting Steering Committee since its inception in 2011. Her publications include Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press) and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere.
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