PUBLIC LECTURE: Barack Obama and the Politics of Change

Speaker: Michael. L. Ondaatje, Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle

Barack Obama’s image is everywhere these days – and why wouldn’t it be? In November 2008, Americans elected a president who by virtue of his race could have been legally owned by the first 16 presidents of the United States. One hundred and forty six years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery, and 46 years after Martin Luther King shared his dream of a future healed by racial equality, a black man sits confidently as the symbol of a new America. If a turning point is a moment in history when significant change takes place, then Obama’s elevation to the pinnacle of US power surely ranks among the most extraordinary turning points in world history. Or does it? Situating Obama within America’s racial past, this lecture will first interrogate the proposition that his election marked the moment at which the nation’s democratic principles at last moved beyond the tribalism of race. But appropriately it will also focus on the present and the future and offer a fresh and frank assessment of Obama’s capacity to transform the American political culture, as well as international relations, after the controversial Bush years.