Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture

Facing East: Revisiting “Osunality,” the Dynamic Powers of Sexuality

Join us for the Shirley Graham and W.E.B. DuBois Lecture with Nkiru Nzegwu, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, Binghamton University & Honorary Professor 2025-2030, Nelson Mandela University, Center for Women & Gender Studies.

Owuwa Anyanwu, the East, the direction of the rising sun, the place of mystery, knowledge, and renewal. It is home where the souls of enslaved Africans in the Americas flew to at death; it is the source from which African immigrants in the Americas draw strength to face the toxic, racialized reality of their new lives. Journeying East brought Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois home when the United States government hounded them out of the country. Facing East takes us to the crucible of knowledge, obscured, to evade Eurocentric domination ideology that colonized people around the world and held them in bondage and oppression. Osunality is the compelling force of existence and order. A maternal regenerative force that keeps the world in balance. Understanding its generative sacred powers, long misnamed, misused, and deployed for depravity and political oppression, unleashes its eruptive creative energy. Osunality unveils new modes of being, thinking, and theorizing that bring forth new realities.