Scholar to Examine Links Between the 1970s Black Power Movement and Australian Aborigine Activists

Filed in Black Studies, Foreign Studies on June 7, 2013

Alex Carter, a doctoral student in Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has received a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Australia. Carter’s research focuses on the links between the Black Power movement in the United States with Australian Aboriginal activists in the early 1970s. While in Australia he will conduct research on the Black Panther Party of Australia and the National Black Theatre of Sydney.

“These cross-cultural and transnational connections between Afro Americans and Aboriginal Australians is a vital component of understanding the trajectory and depth of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements of the 1960s and ‘70s,” Carter said.

Carter will spend a full year in Australia, beginning in August, working with the Performance Research Unit and the Indigenous Centre at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, near Melbourne. His research will also take him to Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra.