2020-2021
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A Message from the Chair
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A Current Look at Our Department
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Remembering Mary Harper
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The Justice in All Black Podcast
7 Africana Studies 2016 Artistic Protest Symposium. Photo credit: Lynn Roberson
africana.uncc.edu
Alumna Update and Honors Student Spotlight
Confronting Our Current Moment: Africana Studies Faculty Address 2020
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Spring 2021 Course Offerings
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Faculty Updates
How to Donate
A Message from the Chair Dear AFRS Community: Saying welcome back seems a tad trivial in this current moment. Our personhood, individually and collectively, is under attack from multiple fronts. So, what does one say to our community amid COVID-19, economic decline, and the continued state-sanctioned murders of Black and Brown people? Instead of saying welcome, I write to you with a call of action. I call on you, regardless of your social location, to challenge anti-Black racism in all its manifestations. AntiBlack racism is prevalent in our health care structures and our political and economic structures. We also experience anti-Black racism in our housing policies and in our educational institutions. Anti-Black racism is a threat to all of us. So, how do we begin to challenge anti-Black racism? There are multiple ways and I offer only two possibilities. We must attack institutions, policies, and practices that enact violence, directly and indirectly, against Black personhood and our communities. Another method of attacking anti-Black racism is to foster and nurture institutions that allow for Black personhood to freely thrive and flourish. Dr. Maya Angelou says, “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.� And this is part of our mission, to create the space necessary for you to enter so that you may thrive. AFRS, born out of racial turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, has actively engaged in challenging antiBlack racism. Our curriculum, which is designed to reflect the interests of our culturally diverse community, offers students the opportunity to learn how to attack anti-Black racism and provide a communal space that allows our students, faculty, and staff to freely thrive and flourish. But our current times are calling for us to be particularly conscientious of all we do to offer a culturally and socially functional education. We understand our work to be focused on theorizing and analyzing a range of issues affecting African descended peoples with the goal of achieving liberation for oppressed people. While our current times are filled with lots of questions, uncertainty, and ever-present anxieties, we want to invite you to become engaged in all that we do to challenge anti-Black racism. Join us, virtually, when we host our annual Dr. Bertha Maxwell Roddey lecture and our symposium. Engage with us. Theorize and analyze with us. Join the conversations and more importantly, help us in our quest for a more just and equitable world. Lift your voice! Sincerely,
Julia Jordan-Zachery, Ph.D.
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A Current Look at our Department
Connect with us at: Africanastudies Unccharlotte
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2020 GRADUATES
MINORS
YOUTUBE
Subscribe to AfricanaStudiesUNCC to view the Justice in All Black podcast
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MAJORS
HONORS STUDENTS
Alumna Update: Dr. Masonya J. Bennett I am Dr. Masonya J. Bennett and I am from Morven, North Carolina, a small rural town about 50 miles southeast of Charlotte. I graduated from UNC Charlotte with a B.A. in Africana Studies and International Studies in 2007 and received my M.A. in Latin American Studies from UNC Charlotte in 2010. While at UNC Charlotte, I spent a semester in the Dominican Republic as part of the study abroad requirements for International Studies and I became deeply interested in Black/Afro-descendent populations, race/processes of racialization, and culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. I was inspired to return for the M.A. after teaching for a year in Honduras and during the M.A, I returned to Dominican Republic and Haiti to conduct research. Some of my core advisors at UNC Charlotte included Dr. Akin Ogundiran, Dr. Deborah Smith, Dr. Greg Mixon, Dr. Greg Weeks, Dr. Jerry Davila, Dr. Jose Manuel Batista, and Dr. Jurgen Buchenau, all of whom continue to be extremely supportive of my endeavors since graduating. They were among the first to encourage me to pursue a doctorate. I initially hesitated, but after I spent two years as an ESL instructor at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, I decided to finally pursue a joint M.A./PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies/Global and Sociocultural Studies (with a focus in Anthropology) at Florida International University. In November 2018, I successfully defended my dissertation, “The New Black in the New South: Negotiating Race and Space in North Carolina’s Immigrant Communities.” My dissertation/ongoing research focuses on the role of space/place, material culture, and affect in the production of Black African, Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx identity and subject-formation in East Charlotte. My research interests were simultaneously influenced by my time abroad and living in Charlotte, particularly during my graduate school years at UNC Charlotte when I interned at International House – a local nonprofit that assists immigrants in their transition to life in North Carolina. I remain profoundly intrigued by the ways in which Black immigrants came to process the racial and spatial dynamics of the U.S. South, and what the usage of the term “New South” came to signify for Black and Brown folx, both newcomers and longtime residents alike.
Undergraduate Honors Student Spotlight: Neud’s Saint-Cyr Neud’s Saint-Cyr is a rising senior at UNC Charlotte and is a member of the University Honors Program and the Africana Studies Honors program. She majors in Africana Studies with a concentration in Health and Environment and minors in Chemistry in order to obtain a well-rounded education in both the humanities and sciences. She has developed a love for teaching and has honed those skills as a tutor and teaching assistant in both of her fields. Neud’s has received several honors and awards, she is a UNC Charlotte Student Marshal, a Martin Scholar, a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and has been recognized by the Chancellor’s List, the Dean’s List, and the Public Anthropology Award. Under the mentorship of Dr. Debra Smith, Neud’s published an auto-ethnography entitled “Not All Skinfolk are Kinfolk: The Impact of the Miseducation of Black Homogeneity in America” in the Johns Hopkins University’s The Macksey Journal (Vol. 1, no. 59) of undergraduate research. Current research interests lie in exploring and juxtaposing the lives and relationships between Black immigrants and African Americans in America and the African diaspora at large, and the role that Black American media plays abroad. Thinking ahead, Neud’s plans to ground her research in the humanities and pursue doctoral studies in either Africana or American studies, possibly using ethnographic methodologies.
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Remembering Mary Harper: Educator, Activist, Pioneer
The Africana Studies department would like to honor and celebrate the life of Mary T. Harper, PhD (b. 1935d. 2020), an educator and activist whose pioneering work with UNC Charlotte and the city of Charlotte has been and continues to be foundational for the Black community. The time of historical preservation and urban renewal in the city of Charlotte raised questions about whose history would be preserved and about the potential displacement of historically Black communities, especially in the Uptown area. As UNC Charlotte attempted to establish broader connections to the city of Charlotte, Dr. Harper emerged as a central figure who saw the importance of preserving and promoting African Americans’ historical legacy and societal contributions to the city of Charlotte. Dr. Harper, along with her mentor Dr. Bertha MaxwellRoddey, co-founded the Charlotte-Mecklenburg AfroAmerican Cultural Center, which is now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture. The pair envisioned the Center as a space where the public could learn about their heritage and celebrate the contributions of Black art, history, and culture. Dr. Harper was also instrumental in founding what is now the Africana Studies department at UNC Charlotte.
Greensboro area, and in 1955 earned a B.A. in English from Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, an M. Ed from UNC Greensboro in 1966, and in 1975 she earned a PhD from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dr. Harper taught in various educational settings, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Barber-Scotia College, Johnson C. Smith University, and in 1971 she joined the UNC Charlotte faculty where she taught in English and Black Studies. Mary Harper was a life member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and a member of other civic organizations such as The Links and the NAACP. Dr. Harper’s life and work embodied the spirit of Black Studies – integrating academic excellence with community outreach and uplift. She retired from UNC Charlotte as Associate Professor of English Emerita in 1991. Dr. Harper has received numerous awards in recognition of her service. Today, the Gantt Center’s grand lobby bears the names of Dr. Harper and Dr. Maxwell-Roddey. Additionally, the UNC Charlotte College of Liberal Arts and Sciences honors Dr. Harper with the Harper-Thomas Endowment, created to help first generation undergraduate students participate in study abroad programs. Dr. Harper passed away on October 1, 2020; we are ever grateful for her service and contributions. Ashe!
Mary T. Harper was born in Mt. Pleasant, North Carolina in 1935. She attended several schools in the
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During the fall of 2019 and the early spring of 2020, the Africana Studies department launched the Justice in All Black Podcast. The Podcast is only one of several departmental initiatives to highlight to the work of our faculty. Additionally, through this podcast we aim to bring attention to past, present, and future social justice issues among people of African descent. Thus far, we have completed three episodes and we look forward to producing more. In the pilot episode, Dr. Crystal Eddins spoke with Dr. Oscar de la Torre about her ongoing research on collective consciousness and forms of resistance in the years leading to the Haitian Revolution. Dr. Eddins described her research process using advertisements for enslaved runaways to discern the mechanisms of marronnage – escape from slavery – as well as its geographic and temporal dimensions. Dr. Eddins’ book, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: African Diaspora Collective Action is in progress toward expected publication in 2021-2022. UNC Charlotte Associate Professor of History Erika Edwards joined us for Episode 2, where she discussed her book Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (The University of Alabama Press, 2020). Dr. Edwards’ comprehensive archival
research in Cordoba, Argentina uncovered stories of women of African descent who, in a myriad of social roles and through various means, sought whiteness as an avenue to better their lives and that of their children. Hiding in Place Sight has won the 2020 Association of Black Women Historian’s LetitiaWoods-Brown Memorial Book Prize. UNC Charlotte Department of Africana Studies Chair Dr. Julia Jordan-Zachery joined Justice in All Black to share her expertise on Black women, local and national politics, and the 2020 presidential election. More specifically, Dr. Jordan-Zachery shared her insights on the killing of Breonna Taylor and the rise of Black women political candidates in the Democratic Party, including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. She also highlighted the importance of collective self-care in the face of what has been a long, contentious political cycle. Former Africana Studies Chair and Chancellor’s Professor Akin Ogundiran will join us for Episode 4 to discuss his newest book, The Yoruba: A New History, and the trajectory of his academic career. To view these and future episodes of Justice in All Black, subscribe to our YouTube channel AfricanaStudiesUNCC.
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Confronting Our Current Moment: Africana Studies Faculty Address 2020 As we all know, 2020 has been a troubling year as we have witnessed an unprecedented combination of political, economic, social, and health crises – all of which have had disproportionately negative impacts on Black people and Black communities. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Jacob Blake. The names of these and others, and the untimely deaths they experienced due to statesanctioned violence sparked the most recent wave of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that grew to an unprecedented scale. What began as a hashtag in 2014, in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, in 2020 developed into what the New York Times reported as the largest protest movement in American history, drawing as many as 26 million participants nation-wide. The latest protests took place amid the uncontrolled global pandemic of COVID-19 of which Black and Spanishspeaking Americans disproportionately bear the brunt, and during a highly contentious and racialized presidential election year. The 2020 presidential election saw historically high voter turnout levels, with both candidates receiving more popular votes than any previous candidate. As votes were counted on the election night of November 3rd and the days that followed, it became clear that the balance of the electoral vote count would come down to battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Donald Trump was awarded the electoral votes for each of these states in 2016, yet in 2020 each state has been called for the Democratic nominee, now Presidentelect Joe Biden. Georgia’s electoral votes have not gone to a Democratic candidate in 28 years.
The pendulum swing of these states can be almost directly attributed to the high turnout of Black voters in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. It is not a coincidence that these are the same locations that in the spring and summer saw large BLM peaceful protests as well as riotous uprisings. Despite the images of looting and property damage, and criticisms of the calls for local municipalities to re-allocate portions of police funds to public goods and services (Defund the Police), BLM has invigorated the Democratic electorate. A study by TargetSmart found that voter registration surged in June during the BLM protests in response to the death of George Floyd. As the third wave of COVD-19 rages, we also face potential challenges to the transition of power at the highest level of political office that may possibly trigger extremist right-wing, white supremacist, and “alt-right” counter-protests such as those in the capital cities of Michigan and North Carolina that opposed COVID-19 restrictions. Black Studies is needed now as much as ever: to guide students in their critical assessment of the current moment and to be a source of support; to urge the university community toward broader inclusiveness; and to speak truth to power about the complex dynamics of the times. This year’s newsletter includes contributions from Africana Studies affiliate and core faculty to address, discuss, analyze, and respond to the critical issues our society and world faces today and offers insight to paths forward. Crystal N. Eddins, PhD Newsletter Editor
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COVID-19, Africa, and History by Akin Ogundiran
The infection and mortality rates of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa have been far lower than those of other continents, especially Europe and North America. As of October 22, Africa's total COVID-19 cases stood at 1.67 million cases, with 40,493 deaths, and 1.38 million recoveries, according to the African Union's Center for Disease Control website. Overall, these are very low figures compared to the 41.5 million cases, 1.14 million deaths, and 28.2 million recoveries worldwide, based on Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center figures. This outcome defies speculations at the onset of the pandemic in March and April when most Western observers projected the worst-case scenario for Africa. The predictions were reasonable, given the historic low capacity of the modern/postcolonial Africa's health care system. But there is also a historical racist prejudice behind the prediction. Africa is often assumed to be a continent of diseases, and whatever looks bad in the global north must be worse in Africa. However, many Western observers missed the fact that very early on most African countries took the pandemic more seriously than North America, Europe, and Asia. Countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, and many others put in place rigorous measures to identify, isolate, and treat COVID-19 cases by early March at a time when
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the United States had no coherent policy or effort in place to combat the pandemic. Given that the outcomes have defied the expectation, armchair commentators have proffered speculations to explain Africa's COVID-19 experience. Some credited the lessons that African nations learned from Western intervention during the Ebola outbreak of 2013-16. Others attributed the outcomes to climate, gene, and food. Some of these speculations are outlandish, as evident in a British Broadcasting Corporation September 3rd story that attributed the low incidences of COVID-19 in Africa to the continent's poverty. It seems that the Western media and a segment of its intellectuals have a penchant for ridiculousness when explaining African humanity. Most of these explanations failed to acknowledge that Africans and their institutions have the capacity for selfpreservation, like every other people. In the West, we tend to forget or are unaware that Africans have solved complex problems such as epidemic outbreaks before Europe became aware of Africa. To drive home this point, I collaborated with several scholars over the summer to use the existing body of archaeological, anthropological, historical, and genomic data to inform the public and scientific community's
understanding of Africa's deep-time relationships with epidemics. The goal was to provide a scientific and historical framework for explaining the African experience of COVID-19. I asked each of the participating scholars to address several questions in a short essay format. These questions include: • How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting the way you as a scholar conceptualize and think about the African past in terms of your interest in the study of social formations and social emergence? • What relationships do you see between this pandemic and any of the past epidemical events in Africa? • What insights can archaeology provide to inform the ways the current pandemic is being managed on the continent? • What can we learn in African archaeology and historical studies from the social, political, economic, and ecological dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide? • What are the materialities of COVID-19 in different parts of Africa today, and what do they tell us about public anxieties, coping strategies, and sociopolitics of the pandemic? (Continued on page 22)
COVID-19 and Black Media Dr. Debra C. Smith
As data reveals that people of color are disproportionately predisposed to COVID-19, and as social media pushes conspiracy theories about the virus’ origin (5G towers), the Black media’s role as disseminator of public health information and advocate for Black health promotion, has never been more significant. The Black press was born close to 200 years ago with the establishment of Freedom’s Journal in 1827. Since that time, it has sought to accurately flesh out the issues, full experiences, and underrepresented perspectives of Black people given the dearth of inclusive journalism. Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Black media including newspapers (The Charlotte Post, The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, etc.) and magazines (Ebony, Jet, among others) has historically disseminated public health information about tobacco, hypertension, sexual health, and overall wellness. Complemented by Black radio and trust in radio personalities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the emergence of social and digital media, studies reveal that many African-Americans depend on Black media for health news, especially statistical data and prevention measures about leading diseases that impact the population like cancer and diabetes. Black media has historically rejected narratives that framed Black people as disease-carriers or, conversely, disease-immune. Black media has also worked to counter false narratives about COVID-19’s impact on Black people and reveal medical racism that is already evident in healthcare centers. One of the most egregious examples of this “infodemic,” a term coined by the World Health Organization to describe disinformation, posited
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that Black people were immune to COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, Black media illuminated the disparate health outcomes that are the direct result of structural racial inequality in the U.S. And, amid skepticism, disinformation, and overrepresentation in front-line jobs that predisposed Black people to the virus, the Black press stepped in to provide critical, racialized, intersectional, public health information. From creating mastheads dedicated to information about COVID-19, to daily statistical updates on trends (reminiscent of Ebony magazine’s monthly “House Call” feature on health and fitness in the 1970s and ‘80s), to pandemic shelter-in-place tips, to documenting the location of free COVID-19 testing sites, Black media has embraced its role to spread accurate information with the goal to improve the emotional, mental, and physical health of Black communities. Despite Black media’s value to the Black community, the pandemic has exposed limitations and exacerbated the vulnerability of this critical resource. Many Black newspapers publish weekly or biweekly, making it impossible to report daily the most recent news about COVID-19. Outlets that have gone digital often cannot budget for the best technology to run user-friendly sites. Moreover, a decline in advertising revenue due to the domino effect of COVID-19 on businesses, challenges the resiliency of the Black press. This revelation has prompted a thrust for federal stimulus funds to be directed to Black media so that it can continue to provide vital public health information and be a health and wellness advocate for its audience.
Sketches of Injustice by Eddy Souffrant
It is mundane, unfortunately, to witness or hear, in our modern times, of vigilante and police brutality against persons of African descent. Some of our intellectual precursors and artists recorded the persistent disregard for black life. Ida B. Wells advocated against the public ‘barbecues’ spectacled throughout the country and Billie Holiday, for her part, sang of the “Strange Fruit” of Southern trees. As a political philosopher, I am baffled that such atrocities do not constitute, as Thomas Hobbes thought, sufficient grounds to forfeit the exclusive violence that we grant the political apparatus and its appendages. Hobbes argued, with his version of the social contract, that the political power the contract initiates would be nullified, if and when the political entity threatens the life of any of its constituents. The violence his proposal engenders is consistent with the mood of Hobbes’s time and is one that I, personally and professionally, am allergic to. It remains that he conceived that hypothetically and with cause, the citizenry can engage in a reactive violence that would seek to counter if not dissolve the threat and practices of an abusive political authority that disregards the life of the citizenry or any of its numbers, i.e. a political authority that undermines its raison d’être. We may think we have outgrown the Hobbesian scenario and the limits it imposes on governmental and public violence because we are modern and that further we, in the West, have worked out a more equitable liberal form of power that renders the reactive violence that Hobbes envisioned unnecessary. Do tell that story to the families and loved ones of the victims of the violence that parades on our screens in the aftermath of vigilante acts ranging from Trayvon Martin to the recent failed attempts to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Or, try to console with more than platitudes, the relatives of the victims of the more repugnant abusive violence that police, as formal representatives of the state apparatus, perpetrates more brazenly on many persons of color. They forfeit, to be sure, their exclusive use of force in the Hobbesian schema yet, the liberal polity shields them. The charitable reading in liberal societies where individual freedom reigns is that such police or vigilante actions preclude harm to others. But liberal societies too have persistently maintained a partial and exclusionary polity. They pit citizens (rightly protected by the law) and non-citizens (illegal: outside of the protection of law). The police brutality and vigilante violence we witness in our States go further. They target and exclude from the protection of the law, persons of color or of African descent, and in extreme cases, their sympathizers. I would argue, were time permitted, that this anti-Black exclusionary mood is not accidental, nor is it a recent development in liberal polity. The anti-Blackness we experience is constitutive of the West. Observers of Western and American living ranging from W. E. B. Du Bois to Sylvia Wynter and Alain Mabanckou (and passing through Fanon and others) assert that the identity of Europe or more broadly construed, the identity of the West, like all identities, emanates from negation. Europe and its later extensions in the Americas conceived of themselves against an ‘Other,’ be it Africa, the indigenous or the enslaved. So as we speak of the ‘systemic racism’ that would motivate anti-Black hatred, we would acknowledge that the systemic in ‘systemic racism’ denotes an embedded Manicheanism that structures our representation of ourselves, and of the world around us. The qualifier also confirms that the anti-Blackness that we see exhibited in the various forms of abusive violence that include lynching, police brutality and the `boogaloos’ (not a dance craze) are constitutive elements of the system we are currently navigating.
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What’s Your Emergency? Race, Discrimination and 9-1-1 Calls by Danielle Boaz
In May 2020, a white woman named Amy Cooper encountered a Black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park in New York City. Christian asked Amy to put her dog on leash in compliance with local laws. Amy became agitated and Christian began recording their interaction. The video that Christian took shows Amy making a false 911 call, claiming that “an African American man” was threatening and trying to assault her. Although Amy spoke to the 911 operator in a panicked and frantic voice as if she was in mortal danger, Christian was simply filming Amy from a distance, saying little and making no observable efforts to approach her. When Christian posted the video on social media with a short narrative about the encounter, it reignited conversations across the nation about race, gender, and the misuse/abuse of emergency services. In the past few years, countless similar reports have appeared in the news and on social media of white men and women calling the police or 911 to report racial minorities who were simply living their daily lives — studying in their dorms, sitting in a coffee shop, barbequing in the park, selling bottled water, enjoying a round of golf, renting an Airbnb, and entering their own apartment/home. In some ways, these calls remind us how many of the atrocities in our nation’s history began. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, countless Black people (i.e. the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till), were unjustly arrested, assaulted, or murdered following false claims that they had threatened and/or attacked a white person.
These unwarranted (and sometimes blatantly false) “emergency” calls also highlight broader societal issues such as gentrification and residential segregation. When private citizens call the authorities to report a Black or Brown person as “suspicious,” “threatening” or potentially engaged in unlawful behavior, they are, knowingly or unknowingly, utilizing emergency services to remove racial minorities from certain types of businesses (i.e. golf clubs and coffee shops) and certain residential areas (usually those that are predominantly white and wealthy). In an era in which widespread protests have made it impossible for anyone in the United States to claim lack of awareness about the pervasive problem of police brutality, one could argue that some private citizens, like Amy Cooper, are intentionally weaponizing calls to 911 and police to threaten, intimidate, and enact violence against racial minorities. In Spring 2021, I will teach a 4000-level Africana Studies seminar titled "What's Your Emergency? Race, Discrimination and 9-1-1 Calls" that will examine these calls, placing them in historical context, considering the factors and influences that produce them, and exploring their economic, social and political effect on society. Over the course of the semester, each student will contribute to a class project that will map and summarize dozens of these calls, and use different methodologies and disciplinary perspectives to analyze them. This course is open to all majors and minors, including Africana Studies, history, legal studies, and criminal justice, among others.
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Poetic expressions by Tanure Ojaide
Beyond My Expectation
There’s Other News
March 29, 2020
April 9, 2020
I guessed all along that knowledge would kill all. That was yesterday before today rolled its dice. In the fierce rivalry for power and influence, I had thought the world headed for self-destruction. More lethal weapons got tested for accuracy. Poisons without antidotes brewed in laboratories. Witchcraft got approval of political archangels.
Other than the haunting casualties of coronavirus, other than muted celebrations of recovery in the face of a heavy toll, other than debates about the role of destiny in all this—many unscathed, others dying or narrowly escaping the virulent skirmishes and battles in the pandemic war of 2019-2020—
That was yesterday. Today the dice has rolled. Who knows tomorrow? My guess is far from the point. It is not yesterday’s power that rules today; we have not set ourselves on fire strong as the desires to rob others to increase our wealth and leave them helpless. The rich aren’t doing well with encumbrances of materials— the powerful are ready to relinquish might for good health.
there’s other news. Individually, the milestone of a birthday, the failure in a contest that would have been great and for which a friend consoles you for your past glories and unexpectedly a friend’s daughter wins a scholarship.
At the rate we started, I thought we would kill ourselves brewing more potent poisons to overwhelm others. I feared accidental discharge would start the catastrophe but lo, no accident or premeditated explosion. Something else, not our knowledge and its hiccups, kills us; something else, not the ingenuity for wealth or power. I expected an explosion but met macabre silence.
Statistics of road accidents down to almost zero; the same of kidnapping and armed robberies. Mass shootings seem to be last century’s blemish, as gangs call a truce to distribute food to vulnerable elderly. So much transformation that marks out the season a turning point from the barbarisms that bedeviled us. There’s other news not breaking as Covid-19’s. For many, the coming of downpours to douse the intolerable heat of the tropics; in some lands despite the lockdown they cannot resist the seduction of cherry blossoms and where the viral decimation astounds it’s the first warm days that turn things to spring to life. . . Other than Covid-19, there’s other news; good or bad but something different and also worth remembering this very year.
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Black Labor is Essential! COVID-19, Racial Injustice, and Policy Recommendations for Low-Wage Workers, by Kendra Jason, PhD Black low-wage workers are the frontline and the fabric of the American workforce, yet they are treated as cheap laborers — without value, expendable, and replaceable. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019) report Black workers disproportionally face challenges in labor market compensation and retirement benefits (e.g., income, healthcare, pensions, union representation, fringe benefits). For instance, Black men earn about $.87 and Black women earn about $.63 for every $1.00 white men earn (Economic Policy Institute, 2020). The wage gap continues to grow, and older Black adults are working longer for financial support and access to healthcare. The effects of COVID-19 have drastically widened the inequity gap Black workers face in employment, exposes them to devastating and long-lasting health effects, and leaves an uncertain and even more precarious future. These workers need income, safe working conditions, and moral support. The Trump Administration has failed to provide basic protections and financial security to our most “essential” workers. Since the onset of COVID-19, the U.S. government has allocated one $1,200 check to American households. Twelve hundred dollars amid an 8-month crisis amounts to about $5.50 per day. Legislation concerning eviction bans are being ignored by landlords forcing families into homelessness. Personal Protection Equipment was not manufactured in mass, distributed, nor regularly replaced. Workers have been cut off from healthcare as they have lost jobs, income, and transportation. And there is no end in sight. Our students, families, and workplaces are made of essential workers and we all must work together to caulk the cracks that so many are falling through because of negligent, slow-moving, and unresponsive institutional policy. The New England Journal of Medicine (2020) released a scathing report on the effects of the deficiencies of leadership which has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy”. We are in the midst of the largest public health crisis of our time and leadership must do more, now, to lessen the dire effects of the combination of COVID-19 and racism for Black workers and their families.
Here are some policies I promote to address this: • Listen to essential workers and give them a place at the table for solutiondriven policy • Promote worker protection and support through unionization and collective bargaining • Provide PPE to workers daily • Offer flexible and reasonable scheduling as essential workers are also thrust into remote learning for children, extended caregiving, and limited social services for their families • Pay a living wage and offer affordable healthcare, regardless of number of hours worked • Push elected officials to provide more stimulus and recovery funding for vulnerable community members With responsible, conscious-driven, and actionable leadership we can make a difference in the lives of essential workers who put their lives at-risk daily so we can assume some resemblance of normalcy.
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“People from some racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately represented in essential work settings such as healthcare facilities, farms, factories, grocery stores, and public transportation. Some people who work in these settings have more chances to be exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 due to several factors, such as close contact with the public or other workers, not being able to work from home, and not having paid sick days” (Center for Disease Control, July 2020).
Black Students & the Educational Divide by Janaka Lewis, PhD
This summer of 2020, as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic that still threatens our state, nation and world and the not new crises manifest in anti-Black violence that became more visible with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and others, students of African American and Black diasporic descent were caught at a cross-section of both as they attempted to learn remotely from home during both. Although remote learning protected their health, the struggle for most school systems and educators to adapt curricular
practices along with the need for parents to navigate the economic and even health impact of the pandemic became a source of research and discussion both theoretically (with the work of Dr. Bettina Love, We Want to Do More than Survive and others) but also the histories of Black education and freedom in America. In my own home, my husband, a high school and college educator, and I tried to teach our own elementary-aged children what they were supposed to know (per public educational standards), but also what it meant to navigate Black childhood in America during ongoing crises such as these. In my own educational practice at home, in research and speaking engagements on parents talking to children about race, I put together book lists for adults, children, and families to encourage and provide context for these conversations and researched and reflected on how “motherschooling” can help to support Black children with their own histories, agency, and empowerment. Along with continuing to uncover the impact of the digital divide on Black families and local impact as well (Mecklenburg County, for example, purchased $1 million worth of hotspots that there was then a great deal of discussion how to use without children having to sit on or near hot buses before many students finally went back to in person learning in November with the ongoing pandemic), there will continue to be a gap discovered and navigated for those who fell between the cracks of society and even here in Charlotte and surrounding areas. There is an ongoing need for educational research and policy that intervenes and offers continued support for parents who want their children to thrive.
Poetics and Black Citizenship by Malin Pereira Across the past few years I have spent more and more time paying attention to how contemporary Black poets engage the issue of black citizenship in the U.S.: Black citizens being treated as non-citizens, being approached as criminals, being met with physical violence – and, importantly, how poets strive to reclaim and assert rightful Black citizenship. One text I have been particularly obsessed with is Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. I think I have taught that book every year since it was published, in 2015. Another poet whose work has captivated me is Reginald Dwayne Betts. His collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era, also published in 2015, and his more recent poems in Felon, address his incarceration as a teenager and the difficult and necessary reclamation of his life. Both Betts and Rankine are publishing prolifically right now, with memoirs, poetry, and even a play (by Rankine, called The White Card. It’s good.) Their work is coming to meet our moment, answering the call. Yet I also am struck by how this year’s focus on criminalization of black bodies, police murders of black people, mass incarceration and the incessant decoupling of Black Americans from citizenship is current “news,” but is, of course, not new at all. I am reminded of that especially in the scholarship of Salamishah Tillet who writes in Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012) how Black writers appropriate sites of slavery in their works as an act of “critical patriotism,” a stance that allows the authors to critique American founding narratives that misrepresent or exclude Blacks. Tillet positions contemporary Black artists as a model citizens engaging “the meta-discourse of American democracy.” Situating their works within the period of slavery signals their stretching of “the black radical tradition into the present, while modelling challenges to ongoing forms of racial retrenchment and imagining an unfinished revolution.” In other words, the work continues. Ultimately, Tillet conceives of Blacks’ “peculiar citizenship” as working to replace U.S. myths with more complex truths (15-17). I like thinking of what we have seen this year -- the protests -- as a form of critical patriotism that may, perhaps, move forward with an unfinished revolution, ensuring full Black citizenship. But then again…
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One Historian’s View of 2020 and the Twenty-first Century by Gregory Mixon
Historians try not to view the discipline as a repetitive exercise within the human experience. My own view is that history does not repeat itself because the human beings responding to a set of events do not, like clockwork, automatically carry out the same response despite what appears to be parallel or similar events such as war, police brutality and abuse, or voter suppression. We are as human beings unpredictable. As a result, the year 2020 has been a unique experience for us collectively with the pandemic of COVID-19 leading the way. Nevertheless, the twenty-first century’s race relations, racial politics, police-Black community relations, and voter suppression appear to have parallel moments in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, 2020 has revealed significant changes in each of these events that are different from their nineteenth century counterparts. Post-Reconstruction America, from the 1880s onward into the first three decades of the twentieth century were noted for lynchings of Black people regardless of age or gender. Scholars mark the late 1880s as the moments when lynching the Black body increased significantly. Race-focused rioting in the North and South were at times connected to police-Black relations in Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City between 1900 and 1905. The 1906 race riot in Atlanta was about change, urbanization (city growth, new people, and challenges to established institution), conflicting agendas about the city’s future, and anti-Black violence to impose a segregated culture upon black and white people in the South. Disfranchisement, ballot box stuffing, voter fraud, and violence combined to suppress
Black voting throughout the 1890s into the opening decades of the twentieth century in the United States South. By the 1930s state governments such as North Carolina pursued ways to reduce lynching by declaring that state government alone should have the power to take a life. While lynching declined, state incarceration took its place. Have the 1980s to the present mirrored the repression Black people experienced one hundred years earlier in the nineteenth century? Voting repression has arisen again but more subtly using the courts, gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court of the United States to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in the twenty-first century. Americans voted into the presidency of the United States in 2008 and 2012 its first non-white leader, Barack Obama; while in response to electing a Black man as the nation’s leader, parts of the nation rejected a white woman in favor of a white racist male seeking to roll-back and overturn 2008-2015. The incarceration state, a reality of the 1980s to the present, continued a hundred plus year process where the rule of law was manipulated to imprison Black bodies to partially fuel the nation’s shift to industrialization. Yet, the rage in response to police-Black confrontations where Black citizens have been killed has mobilized in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement a multiracial response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Does this multiracial response in the twenty-first century reflect a change countering voter suppression, police abuse, and at last public recognition of the Declaration of Independence or are we reliving the repression of the nineteenth century when the nation endorsed segregation as a national and international policy?
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Drowning in Hot Pea Soup: Pandemic, Poverty, Power, & Pedagogy by Annette Teasdell As a result of the novel Coronavirus-19 pandemic, the U.S. finds itself in a national state of emergency, leaving many Americans in dire straits. Schools are moving to virtual instruction. Employees are forced to telework. Restaurants and retail stores are closing. The people most affected are the nation’s poor. Given their place in the social order, the majority of those living in poverty cannot afford to heed the advice of experts to self-quarantine at home for 30 days when their livelihood is based on an hourly paycheck with no medical or annual leave benefits. Due to the digital divide (lack of technology and internet access), many of these families cannot access online learning, yet this is the expectation in this unprecedented era of COVID-19. Power is in the hands of those who control wealth and capital and who maintain traditional class, ethnic, and gender inequalities. Nonetheless, the people in power do not see the needs of the poor or the impact of such drastic instructional change on teaching practices. Given this global pandemic, what are the educational implications at the intersections of pandemic, poverty, power, and pedagogy? Maintenance of repressive economic, sociocultural, and political power of dominant groups fuels a system that contributes to students’ failure to succeed and the schools’ failure to ameliorate social problems. The very future of democracy depends on our ability to develop radical theories and practices that make it possible to plan and fight for an equitable, egalitarian social order. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Charlotte Mecklenburg schools were immediately closed and students and families learned that all instruction would be online effective immediately. This created significant challenges for many families. It is a privilege to have access to computers, internet, and technology. For poor people, this is not a given. Even if families used the public library for internet access, this too is a problem because libraries closed to abate the spread of the virus. Teachers with varying levels of expertise in online instruction immediately prepared course materials for easy access in a virtual learning management system like Canvas or Google classroom. For those who already incorporated twenty-first century technology in their classrooms, this was not difficult. A number of teachers had to learn this new technology and implement it in a short period of time. In doing so, they had to creatively simulate face to face instruction. For students, understanding how to access these tools might be easy but given the digital divide, they could possibly fall behind.
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This is directly correlated to pedagogical practices and power dynamics with the students whose family income falls below the poverty line being the ones hardest hit by this challenge. According to Wiggan (2011), data indicate that when students have access to high-quality instruction, school enrichment, and culturally responsive curricula and pedagogy, they have higher levels of social outcome and performance. This applies to all students regardless of race, gender, or class. Will all students have equal access to quality teaching, school enrichment, and culturally responsive curricula in an online environment when they do not have access to technology? This is a large part of the class divide. Due to the immediate and ill planned response to COVID-19, teaching practices are extremely compromised. As a result, pedagogical practices have shifted dramatically. Polling students and families from across the distinct yields that instruction varies from online Zoom meetings to packets of work to no instruction at all. This is a concern for everyone because of the short-term and long-term effects of poor instructional quality. The educational implications of the intersections of pandemic, poverty, power, and pedagogy are manifold. Over the last few months, schools across the country have transitioned students from face-to-face instruction to virtual learning to abate the spread of COVID-19. Implications of this align with the need for a critical Afrocentric feminist theory of education. While the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools feverishly attempted to mold their teaching practices and course content to fit virtual platforms, students struggled with the novelty of the situation. Daily news updates indicate that this idea still needs further development. Online learning is here to stay so beginning to transition now as a result of COVID-19 is a step forward. The question is how do all students, regardless of the matrix of domination, gain access. Given where the nation stands with COVID-19, Collins (2009) clearly expresses the urgency of the current situation stating, “Quite frankly, no one wins and everyone loses if the social issues that face growing numbers of the world’s population are not given serious thought,” (Collins, 2009, p. vii.). A critical Afrocentric feminist theory of education can create a counterspace for educational transformation in today’s schools.
The United States’ Relationship to Race and Violence, Considered Violence against Black and Brown bodies has long been routinized. Every weekend, we watch young men risk severe injury, drastically shorten their lives and risk CTE for a college degree or for a few million dollars. I note this as mixed martial arts viewership has exploded in the past quarter century. Both enterprises market their White athletes and treat their Black athletes as disposable. I recently learned that the director of the movie “Commando” (1985) felt compelled to edit a scene where the protagonist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, kissed a Black woman, Rae Dawn Chung, fearing that it would turn away ticket buyers. “Commando,” it must be noted, has the highest kill count of any project starring Schwarzenegger – the deadliest actor on record. A few years later, we all watched the invasion of Panama, the bombing of Iraq and the Rodney King assault on our various news outlets; violent moments that launched the news network phenomenon. Aimé Césaire reminds us that violence is the organizing tool of Western Civilization. The history of the United States has established the acceptability of violence against certain bodies to the end of profit. The well-known violence of slavery was not cause for revolution in 1776, but excess taxes; nor was slavery sufficient cause to invade the South before their secession. Lynchings in the Jim Crow South were advertised spectator events for the whole family. Bull Conner’s German shepherds attacking peaceful marchers drew viewership to news stations, meanwhile in 1967 show producers frantically worked to obscure a kiss between Capt. Kirk – a White man – and Lt. Commander Uhura – a Black woman. The country’s response to the September 11th strikes, its images also replayed ad nauseum, reveals a transgression of the highest order – that White, Global North bodies had been assailed and the continuing threat of terrorism put these privileged bodies in peril. Yet we all watched, with varying levels of complacency and complicity, as Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed by the war machine. Just as the country has viewed, on repeat, police kill Black people and ICE agents kidnap the Brown skinned undocumented workers for the better part of the past decade. All to the boon of the television stations and social media influencers (by no means mutually exclusive entities). The praxis, then, is acceptability and profitability of violence on non-European descended people. George Floyd notwithstanding, where was the outrage previous? Yet, whether Harlem in 1935, Detroit in 1967, L.A. in 1992, Baltimore in 1968 or 2015, and in Minneapolis or Atlanta this year when Black people respond to injustice, the lament is reserved for the damage to property, reinforcing the salience of capital over the defense of African American lives. This holds so tragically true that the murderers of Breonna Taylor were not charged for her death but for the impact of their wanton use of force to an apartment building. It used to be a joke that Black people die early in movies, the fact of the matter being far more lucrative.
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization …” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Dr. Felix Jean-Louis
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Course Offerings, Spring 2021 COURSE
Section
AFRS1100
001
AFRS1100
002
AFRS2050
002
AFRS2050
003
AFRS2050
004
AFRS2112
001
AFRS2156
001
AFRS2161
001
AFRS2172
001
AFRS2174
001
AFRS2206
001
AFRS2215
001
AFRS3050
001
AFRS3050
002
AFRS3050
004
AFRS3050
005
AFRS3050
006
AFRS3050
007
AFRS3121
001
AFRS3179
001
AFRS3260
001
AFRS3261
001
AFRS3265
001
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Course Title
Instructor Name
Instructional Method
Online: No Specific Mtg Times Online: No Specific Intro to Africana Studies Mtg Times Topics in Africana Studies: Intersections of Apartheid and Online: Specific Post Apartheid novel Ibrahim, Huma Mtg Times Topics in Africana Studies: Lady Justice may be blind but Online: No Specific she is not color-blind Carter, Charleston Mtg Times Online: No Specific Topics in Africana Studies: Black Women since 1877 Linker, Destiney Mtg Times Ogundiran, Online: Specific Yoruba Language & Culture II Akinwumi Mtg Times Ogundiran, Online: No Specific African Civilization Akinwumi Mtg Times Online: Specific The African American Experience: Civil War to Civil Rights Mixon, Gregory Mtg Times Online: Specific Black Sexuality and Health Harris, Felecia Mtg Times Online: No Specific Environmental Literature in Africa and the Caribbean Missihoun, Honore Mtg Times Online: No Specific African Lit, Music & Art Ojaide, Tanure Mtg Times Smith-Ruiz, Online: No Specific Black Families in the US Dorothy Mtg Times Topics in Africana Studies: Social Justice Movements in the Online: No Specific African Diaspora Eddins, Crystal Mtg Times Online: No Specific Topics in Africana Studies: Race and Education Smith, Debra Mtg Times Online: Specific Topics in Africana Studies Moore, Julia Mtg Times Online: Specific Topics in Africana Studies Moore, Julia Mtg Times Online: No Specific Topics in Africana Studies: African Genocide Ibrahim. Huma Mtg Times Online: Specific Topics in Africana Studies: African American Oratory Black, Jason Mtg Times Online: Specific Contemporary African Art Homann, Lisa Mtg Times Online: Specific Afr Amer Poliical Philosophy Miller, Joshua Mtg Times Online: No Specific Slav Rac, & Col Afr Diaspora Eddins, Crystal Mtg Times Online: No Specific Psyc of the Black Experience Pinckney, Charles Mtg Times Robinson, Online: No Specific African Economic Development Veronica Mtg Times Intro to Africana Studies
Smith, Debra De la Torre Cueva, Oscar
Course Offerings, Spring 2021 Course Title
Instructional Instructor Name Method
COURSE
Section
AFRS3290
001
Research Methods
Smith, Debra
Online: No Specific Mtg Times
AFRS3290
H01
Research Methods
Smith, Debra
Online: No Specific Mtg Times
AFRS3692
001
Colloquium: Modernist Dialogue Between African & African American Women Writers & Feminist Thinkers
Ibrahim, Huma
AFRS3692
002
Colloquium
AFRS3895
001
Independent Study
Online: Specific Mtg Times Online: No Specific Missihoun, Honore Mtg Times Online: No Specific Mtg Times
AFRS4000
090
Senior Seminar in Africana Studies: Black Women, Politics and Policy
Jordan-Zachery, Julia
Online: Specific Mtg Times
AFRS4000
H90
Senior Seminar in Africana Studies: Black Women, Politics and Policy
Jordan-Zachery, Julia
Online: Specific Mtg Times
AFRS4050
002
Topics in Africana Studies: What's Your Emergency? Race, Discrimination and 911 Calls
Boaz, Danielle
Online: Specific Mtg Times
AFRS4050
003
Topics in Africana Studies: Gender and Black Performance Narratives in Literature and Film
Lewis, Janaka
AFRS4100
001
African Diaspora Theory
AFRS4100
H01
African Diaspora Theory
AFRS4790
H01
Senior Honors Project/Thesis
AFRS5000
001
Special Topics in Africana Studies
AFRS5000
002
Special Topics in Africana Studies: Dismantling Racism in America
LBST2102
001
Global Connections (AFRS)
LBST2102
002
Global Connections (AFRS)
LBST2212
001
Literature & Culture (AFRS)
LBST2212
002
Literature & Culture (AFRS)
LBST2301
001
Critical Thinking and Communication (AFRS)
LBST2301
002
Critical Thinking and Communications (AFRS)
LBST2301
003
Critical Thinking and Communication (AFRS)
LBST2301
004
Critical Thinking and Communication (AFRS)
Online: Specific Mtg Times Online: Specific Mtg Boaz, Danielle Times Online: Specific Mtg Boaz, Danielle Times De la Torre Cueva, Online: No Specific Oscar Mtg Times De la Torre Cueva, Online: Specific Mtg Oscar Times Online: Specific Mtg Times Online: No Specific Mtg Times Online: No Specific Mtg Times Online: No Specific Teasdell, Annette Mtg Times Online: No Specific Ojaide, Tanure Mtg Times Online: No Specific Missihoun, Honore Mtg Times Online: No Specific Missihoun, Honore Mtg Times Robinson, Online: No Specific Veronica Mtg Times Ogundiran, Online: Specific Mtg Akinwumi Times Bryant, Oscar Robinson, Veronica Smith-Ruiz, Dorothy
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Tanure Ojaide Tanure Ojaide is a writer, poet, and Professor of Africana Studies. He recently co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature (London and New York, 2020). The handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa.
Crystal N. Eddins Crystal Eddins published a research article “‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’ Marronnage as Reproductive Justice in Colonial Haiti” in Gender & History (Vol. 32, No. 3) and contributed blog pieces to Black Perspectives, the Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society and Age of Revolutions, an open-access peer-reviewed academic journal. Dr. Eddins was awarded a College Educators Research Fellowship from the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She continues to co-host in the Justice in All Black podcast; other recent service work includes joining the advisory board for ProQuest online content on African American History and Social Movements; and serving as a panelist on the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance Podcast Conversation on Racial Equity and Justice and the Delta Sigma Theta “Brewed to Excellence: Rising Above the Glass Ceiling” program.
Debra C. Smith Dr. Debra C. Smith participated in the CLAS virtual programs outreach initiative to engage new students, while focusing on race and racism. Dr. Debra C. Smith has been nominated to serve as a Model Teacher in the “Teachers Observing Peers (TOP)” program for 2020-2021. TOP offers an opportunity for instructors to observe excellent teaching and to engage in structured dialogue about teaching. As part of the program, Smith will make her courses available for fellow instructors to observe in Canvas and then debrief her course(s) with them to clarify questions and reflect on the course observation. Dr. Smith also was appointed to the city of Charlotte’s Legacy Commission to engage in a comprehensive study of street names and monuments in the city that honor a legacy of Confederate soldiers, slaveowners and segregationists. The Commission aims to ensure that Charlotte’s history is accurately and fairly reflected in the city’s public displays.
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Danielle Boaz Dr. Danielle Boaz will publish her first book, Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora with the Pennsylvania State University Press in February 2021. Banning Black Gods is a global examination of the legal challenges faced by adherents of the most widely practiced Africanderived religions in the twenty-first century, including Obeah, Santeria/Lucumi, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe, Rastafari, Islam, Vodou, and Voodoo. Examining court cases, laws, human rights reports, and related materials, Danielle N. Boaz argues that restrictions on African diaspora religious freedom constitute a unique and pervasive form of anti-Black discrimination.
Akin Ogundiran Akin Ogundiran recently published a new book, The Yoruba: A New History (Indiana University Press, 2020), the first transdisciplinary study of the 2,000-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Akin’s collaboration on Africa’s long-term relationship to epidemics resulted in a forum published in the September issue of African Archaeological Review. His contribution is titled "Managing Epidemics in Ancestral Yorùbá Towns and Cities: Sacred Groves as Isolation Sites." Dr. Ogundiran received a National Geographic Explorer Grant and published two articles in collaboration with the UNC Charlotte Center for Applied Geographic Information Science. He delivered several talks including the 28th Annual Distinguished Lecture in African Archaeology at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Eddy Souffrant Eddy Souffrant recently published an article entitled “Some Approaches to an Ethics for Disaster” in Philosophy in the Contemporary World: An International Journal (Vol. 25 No. 2). Dr. Souffrant contributed testimony regarding UN Principles for Responsible Management as a member of the International CSR Networks of IAElyon School of Management. He has also served a a review panelist for the NEH Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges for 2020.
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Kendra Jason Dr. Jason is an Associate Professor of Sociology and an Affiliate Faculty of Africana Studies. She was recently appointed to the Sloan Research Network on Aging & Work at Boston College. Along with Dr. Dorothy Smith-Ruiz, Dr. Jason received a UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Grant on “Filling the Gap: Addressing the Needs of Caregiving African American Grandparents” for $7,348. Dr. Jason has given several talks such as to the National Academy of Sciences Public Workshop for Committee on Understanding the Aging Workforce, Employment at Older Ages, and she was the Distinguished Speaker in Gerontology at Concordia University in Chicago. Dr. Jason co-organized a webinar on “Enhancing Economic Security for Older Low-Wage Workers” for the Gerontological Society of America; and her scholarship has been featured in Forbes.
Felix Jean-Louis Felix Jean-Louis is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies. He is a historian of the African Diaspora holding a Masters in African and African Diaspora Studies and a PhD in History, both from Florida International University in Miami, FL. His 2020 dissertation, “Between Harlem and Paris: Haitian Internationalism in the Interwar Period, 1918-1934,” explores the contributions of Haitian elites to the various diaspora making projects in the colonial metropoles. He is an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Scholars Fellow for the 20202021 academic year where he has been placed at the University of California at Irvine. This summer he will be a post-doctoral fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Amherst.
Malin Pereira I am Executive Director of the Honors College, which has increased Black and biracial participation by 158% since 2012. Akin Ogundiran has joined our Endorsement Committee, which recommends applicants to be nominated by the University for the Rhodes, Goldwater, Truman, etc. I taught a Contemporary Black Poetry graduate seminar in Spring 2020, and a seminar on Black Poetry and the Idea of Citizenship for Charlotte Teachers Institute in Fall 2020. I will teach an Honors seminar on Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free, in Spring 2021. I published two articles: “Thylias Moss’s Slave Moth: Liberatory Verse Narrative and Performance Art” in Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination; and “An Angry, Mixed Race Cosmopolitanism: Race, Privilege, Poetic Identity, and Community in Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina and Thrall” in New Cosmopolitanisms, Race and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives.
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Annette Teasdell Grounding her research in over 15 years’ experience in teaching at the post-secondary and secondary levels, Annette Teasdell is committed to exploring the contours of Black feminist pedagogies and Afrocentric curriculum reform. She is a lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Africana Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Urban Education. She can be reached at ateasdel@uncc.edu.
Gregory Mixon Greg Mixon helped organize a branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Charlotte, the Romare Bearden Branch of ASALH. He served on the Academic Program Committee to organize the first virtual national conference of ASALH in September 2020. Dr. Mixon was a panelist on California State University’s “Community Conversations,” and moderated the UNC Charlotte Chancellor Speaker Series discussion with historian, literary scholar, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mixon also wrote contributed book reviews for the International Journal of Africana Studies and the Journal of the Civil War Era.
Janaka Lewis Dr. Lewis is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program. Dr. Lewis published "Handle Us Warmly: Girlhood, Community and Radical Creativity in for colored girls" in the CLA Journal (March 2020), as well as "Black Girl Magic, Storytelling and the City Space” for SchoolLibrary Connection (Feb. 2020). She also co-wrote a children's book entitled Dr. King is Tired, Too! with Mac Andrew Bowman, MD (Book Vine Press, August 2020).
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How to Donate to Africana Studies Your donation will support our community outreach efforts, annual lectures and conferences, student scholarship, and our artist-in-residence program. For more information, please contact: africana_studies@uncc.edu, 704.687.5161; or Judy Lekoski, Major Gifts Office for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at 704.687.0085, jlekoski@uncc.edu; or Tanner Greaves, Development Officer at Tanner.Greaves@uncc.edu, 704.687.6333
Thank you.
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Reporting and editing by: Crystal Eddins Photographs courtesy of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Africana Studies Department; Cover photograph: Lynn Roberson