We are pleased to invite you all to the 2026 Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture, "Making Home in the World: Kathleen Neal Cleaver's Photographic Archives" with Dr. Leigh Raiford.

The lecture will be held at 1705 College Street, Columbia, SC in the Close-Hipp Eastview Room (8th floor) on Tuesday, October 20th from 6-7:30 PM. Please register here: bit.ly/freeman2026.

Undergradate and graduate students can register for a catered lunch with Dr. Raiford from 11 AM - 12 PM on October 20th here. Students are welcome to drop-in for part of the session, but must provide advance notice and register by 3:00 PM on Friday, October 16th.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about Black visuality and world-making. Raiford is the author of When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026), Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024); co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017), and co-editor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006).  Raiford is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. 

This talk examines how human rights lawyer and former Black Panther Party Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver has used photography to make “home” in the world. Through close examination of a family photography album made by Cleaver of her family's time living in exile in Algeria and France, 1969-1972, and drawing on her three years of working with Cleaver leading a team organizing and cataloging her vast personal photography archive, (since acquired by Emory University, and currently on display at Auburn Avenue Research Library, Atlanta), Raiford considers the everyday image making practices that a public figure committed to improving the conditions of Black lives globally has engaged to imagine, identify, create, fabulate, inhabit, leave and, sometimes, destroy “home.”

While Cleaver's photography collection broadly, and the family album specifically, have great political and historical significance, enriching our knowledge about the Black Panther Party, the work of Black internationalism in the era of Black Power, and gender politics in the context of Black revolutionary struggles, it is perhaps best understood as a family archive. Thus, Raiford reads the Algiers album as a Black-woman authored text that offers an affective and personal history of a movement that has been conveyed primarily as historical document. Its form as a family album forces us to reckon with the messiness of movement and cannot deny the failures and disappointments of family relations--whether a difficult marriage, a growing community of exiles, family as a metaphor for nationalism or as a map of intergenerational kinship ties--as well as the possibilities and limitations of photography itself. 

This lecture is free and open to the public. A reception with light refreshments will follow the event.

All Good Books will be selling copies of When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World on site and attendees will have the opportunity to have their book autographed by Dr. Raiford.

The Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture in African American Women’s Studies was established in 1993 in memory of Adrenée Glover Freeman, a Columbia attorney who was active in civic affairs and served on the Community Advisory Board of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Each year the lecture is given by a prominent African American woman.

 

Please contact taj17@mailbox.sc.edu if you need parking accommodations or have any questions. Reserved parking spaces will be limited. 

Reception and book signing to follow.Reception and book signing to follow.