KEYNOTE LECTURE AND DISCUSSION – KYLE T. MAYS, A SCHOLAR OF INDIGENOUS AND AFRO-INDIGENOUS STUDIES

Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at UCLA. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of urban history and studies, Afro-Indigenous Studies, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018). He is currently finishing two manuscripts. The first, forthcoming with Beacon Press is titled, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, which will be a part of their ReVisioning American History series. This book argues that African enslavement and Indigenous dispossession have been central to the founding of the United States, and explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have resisted U.S. democracy from the founding of the U.S. to the present. The second manuscript is tentatively titled, Detroit vs. Every(body): The Sites of Dispossession and Transformation in a Modern American City (currently under review). The book argues that the transformation of modern Detroit (from the late 19th until the emergency management era) is rooted in the simultaneous processes of Black American and Indigenous dispossession. He also has a forthcoming chapter, “Blackness and Indigeneity” in the collection, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Keisha Blain and Ibram Kendi (eds.), (New York: Random House, 2020).