Upcoming Events
Africana@50 with Professor Mũgo
Celebrating AFRICANA@50: “The imperative of Utu/Ubuntu in scholarship if Africana Studies and Research are to be celebrated as liberated zones in academia” by Professor Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo
- Wednesday, May 5, 2021
- 4:00pm to 5:30pm
- Virtual Event
Our last event of the semester will be a talk by Professor Mũgo as part of the postponed celebration of Africana@50. She was scheduled to deliver her address on Friday on May 1st, 2020. As they say, the rest is history. We are very pleased that she has agreed to give the talk virtually this year.
In 1969, following the civil rights movement, amid student protests nationally and in the wake of the historic student-led occupation of Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus, the Africana Studies & Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell University was formally established as the trailblazer of field of Africana Studies as an academic field committed to rigorous intellectual knowledge production and learning with critical capacity applied to social transformation. It was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary academic field with a focus on global Africa encompassing the African continent and the Diaspora. Opened in Fall 1969, under the leadership of its founding Director, Professor James Turner, the center initially offered an undergraduate major, a robust master’s degree and about forty years later, a PhD program was created. The celebration of fifty years after its inception is critical and fosters forward-looking reflections on the remarkable journey of arguably the most far-reaching academic innovation of the second half of the 20th century. This celebration calls for the need to reclaim the pioneering role of Africana Studies at Cornell University by ensuring its agility to respond to the new national and global dynamics in academia and society at large and remain at the forefront in theoretical and pedagogical innovations while sustaining its commitment to activism and community engagement.
past Events
BLACK LIVES MATTER: L’INDISPENSABLE CONVERGENCE DES LUTTES AUX USA ET DANS LA DIASPORA GLOBALE
Please join Dr. Rokhaya Diallo and Dr. Gregory S. Jenkins for a discussion with Hon. Dr. Aminata D. Traoré, former Minister of Culture and Tourism, Republic of Mali. Activist, Author, Coordinator of the United Nations Development Program(UNDP).
- Monday, April 30, 2021
- 10:00am - 12:00pm (EST)
- 2:00pm - 4:00pm (GMT)
- Virtual Event
An interview with Her Excellency Dr. Aminata D. Traoré former Minister of Culture and Tourism, Republic of Mali, activist, author, coordinator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Dr. Traoré is based in Bamako, Mali.
Interviewers: Dr. Rokhaya Diallo, journalist, author, filmmaker, and activist for racial, gender and religious equality. Dr. Diallo is based in Paris, France.
Dr. Gregory S. Jenkins, Professor of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, Geography, and African Studies at Penn State University. Professor Jenkins is based in Pennsylvania, USA.
Languages: English and French with simultaneous translation.
Open to the public. The interview will be followed by a Q & A.
Pan-African Connections
Please join Dr. Carole Boyce Davies and Dr. N‘Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba for a discussion of the edited collection: Pan-African Connections.
- Monday, April 26, 2021
- At 4:00pm to 6:00pm
- Virtual Event
Pan-African Connections brings to the reader a combination or Reflections and Testimonies from writers. politicians, activists. colleagues: with essays on intellectual activism, the Building of Pan-African institutions and the voices of women in Pan-Africanism. Stories abound from writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Anyang’ Nyong·o. Locksley Edmondson who is featured in this collection, like Walter Rodney, lived and worked on the African continent physically, but also engaged Africa politically, culturally and intellectually in teaching and research in the Caribbean and the United States. The lives and work of these scholars embodied precisely the bringing together of African. Caribbean and African-American Studies in the intellectual arena. Through this generation of intellectual/activists. the rubric of Pan-Africanism remains one of the key areas of academic and political discourse.