Hal Weaver is retired but continues to be active in working toward transnational cultural relations, cross-cultural communication, respect and understanding through film, media, education and the arts.
In Spring of 2018 he spent time at the Pendle Hilll Quaker center working on his memoirs. While there he presented an informal evening discussion titled Balck Fire: An African American Quaker Seeker-Activist in a White Supremecist Nation. He shared insights and experiences from his poursal journey through life.
Recent activities include a lecture on “Decolonization and the Cold War: African Student Elites in the USSR as Transnational Actors” in September 2016 at Harvard University, where he is an Alumnus Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute (Hutchins Center for African and African American Research).
In Spring 2015, Hal spent 6 weeks in China, where he offered a course in "Black Films, History, and Politics", a multi-disciplinary course in African American, American and African Studies for graduate students at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He also gave a lecture at Zhejiang University, China's leading institution in African research and training.
In addition, during his sojourn in China, he helped initiate an agreement between the Beijing Film Academy and the Zanzibar International Film Festival.
Just before turning 80, Hal realized his dream to travel on the Trans-Siberian express from Beijing to Moscow. Back in Russia for the first time in over 50 years, he took part in an international African Studies conference. He gave a presentation on Soviet training programs for Africans during the early years of African decolonization, and was delighted with by the discussions he had with fellow scholars from Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The conference was especially memorable because he had not visited the Africa Institute in Moscow since a 1963 memorial service for W.E.B. Du Bois, who had earlier given Hal a personal letter of introduction to the Institute’s founding director.
Hal’s CIE doctoral dissertation, Soviet Training and Research Programs for Africans, was the first book-length monograph on African students in the USSR.
Hal was invited to present on “Black Filmmakers’ Transformation of the Cinematic Representation of Chattel Slavery in the Americas,” the closing event of the UN’s year-long “Remember Slavery” lecture-film series in 2015.
Hal was Founding Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University. He is also the founder of The BlackFilm Project, The BlackQuaker Project, and The China-Africa-Russia Project. [5-18]
Email: weaverhal@yahoo.com