Published: March 11, 2009
Obama - The First 100 Days: Public lecture at the University of Leicester
Public lecture at the University of Leicester, Monday March 16 at 6pm
A member of the US diplomatic team is to address the University of Leicester on the first 100 days of Barack Obama's presidency.
The event, at 6pm on Monday 16 March, is hosted by the Centre for American Studies, and takes place in the Attenborough building, Lecture Theatre 1. It is open to the public and free and will include a Q & A session.
Assistant cultural attaché from the US Embassy in London, Mark Lanning, will discuss the first 100 days of Obama's presidency -a time period made significant by the work undertaken by Presidents John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt in their first 100 days.
Dr George Lewis, Director of the Centre for American Studies & Reader in American History at the University of Leicester said: "This is a great opportunity for people with an interest in US politics to listen, and then put questions, to a member of the US diplomatic team.
"Obama's rise to prominence has clearly captured the public imagination on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because of the clear break he represents from the Bush Administrations, but also because of who he is and what he represents.
"He is of interest to academics as a self-confessed avid reader of books and a possessor of a rich intellectual background, but he is also of particular interest in terms of the focus of the Centre for American Studies here at the University of Leicester, given the strengths of the Centre in the fields of racial and ethnic identity, and racial politics.
"Obama's ascent to the White House, for example, was as much about complexity as it is about opportunity. While, for example, his campaign team spent months attempting to portray his candidacy as "post-race", media analysts centred their observations on the fact that here was a black man running a post-race campaign.
"More importantly, Obama openly describes himself as an African American, yet, as a number of commentators have suggested, his family background is not so simple. Obama's claim that "There is not a black America...There is not a white America...There is the United States of America" masks complexities with which American citizens are once again beginning to grapple in public forums.
"Decades of state-sponsored racial segregation simplified racial identity in the US by protecting whiteness: in the simplistic world of white supremacy, if you could not prove yourself to be white, then you were automatically assumed to be black. Obama's diverse and diffuse background stands somewhat at odds with the clarity of his self-identification as African American, just as the idea of an America polarised between black and white stands at odds with the rich tapestry of ethnic groups who increasingly make up its population."
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