Theorizing Black Studies: Representing African-Americans in the African Imagination
Overview
The Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, in conjunction with the Frederick Douglass Institute, is organizing a series of lectures featuring scholars and creative writers who will highlight and deepen our understanding of the multiple ways people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic have thought about and imagined each other’s worlds. These lectures, while acknowledging the centrality of the African-American experience within the Black Diaspora, will also show that this centrality requires a critical investigation of the representations of Black America in the cultural productions of Africans, Antilleans, Haitians and Black Europe. Paris-based and award-winning novelist Leonora Miano, Scholar and writer Juliana Nfah-Abeny and Scholar Ambroise, from the University of Yaoundé (Cameroon) and the College of the Holy Cross will be speaking in the Fall (2009) and Spring (2010) in this discussion that bridges the gap separating Africans from African Americans. A collection of essays from the project lectures and conferences will be published and will proved to be an original contribution in the field of diasporic black studies.