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Race, Ethnicity and Higher Education in the African Diaspora: Guest Editors' Introductory Note
José Jackson-Malete, Amy Jamison, Vaughn W. M. Watson, Aaron Kamugisha, Monique D. A. Kelly, and Upenyu S. Majee
Authors in this issue of Alliance for African Partnership Perspectives, "Race, Ethnicity, and Higher Education in the African Diaspora," responded to a Call for Thought Pieces from anywhere in the world—urgent, critical reflections of issues around race and ethnicity in higher education institutions and key stakeholder and collaborator organizations in Africa and the African Diaspora.
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The Caribbean as Diaspora: From Exile to Affirmation
Aaron Kamugisha
Caribbean art as a diasporic, fugitive phenomenon: a groundbreaking global survey.
The 1990s were a period of profound political transformation, from the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc to the rise of trade agreements that continue to influence the world we live in today. Emerging from this pivotal decade—which also shaped the production, circulation and framing of art in the Caribbean—Forecast Form traces a path into the present, highlighting forms, materials and processes that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place.
This volume features scholarly essays alongside richly illustrated plate sections and texts focused on an intergenerational group of 37 artists working across the Americas and Europe. A radical rethinking of contemporary art in the Caribbean, Forecast Form reveals the region as a place where the past, the present and the future meet—where continuous exchanges forecast what is to come while remaining grounded in the histories that shape the present.
Artists include: Candida Alvarez, Firelei Báez, Álvaro Barrios, Frank Bowling, Sandra Brewster, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Christopher Cozier, Julien Creuzet, Maksaens Denis, Peter Doig, Jeannette Ehlers, Tomm El-Saieh, Alia Farid, Teresita Fernández, Rafael Ferrer, Denzil Forrester, Joscelyn Gardner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Deborah Jack, Engel Leonardo, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Suchitra Mattai, David Medalla, Ana Mendieta, Lorraine O'Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Keith Piper, Marton Robinson, Donald Rodney, Freddy Rodríguez, Tavares Strachan, Zilia Sánchez, Rubem Valentim, Adán Vallecillo, Cosmo Whyte and Didier William.Authors: Carla Acevedo-Yates, Genevieve Hyacinthe, and Aaron Kamugisha
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Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects
Daphne Lamothe
The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies—termed the post-soul era—created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of "Black aesthetic time"—a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide in the process of cultural production—she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders—or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time.
Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves.
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Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State
Aaron Kamugisha, Charisse Burden-Stelly, and Percy C. Hintzen
Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State collects thirteen key essays on the Caribbean by Percy C. Hintzen, the foremost political sociologist in Anglophone Caribbean studies. For the past forty years, Hintzen has been one of the most articulate and discerning critics of the postcolonial state in Caribbean scholarship, making seminal contributions to the study of Caribbean politics, sociology, political economy, and diaspora studies. His work on the postcolonial elites in the region, first given full articulation in his book The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad, is unparalleled.
Reproducing Domination contains some of Hintzen’s most important Caribbean essays over a twenty-five-year period, from 1995 to the present. These works have broadened and deepened his earlier work in The Costs of Regime Survival to encompass the entire Anglophone Caribbean; interrogated the formation and consolidation of the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean state; and theorized the role of race and ethnicity in Anglophone Caribbean politics. Given the recent global resurgence of interest in elite ownership patterns and their relationship to power and governance, Hintzen’s work assumes even more resonance beyond the shores of the Caribbean. This groundbreaking volume serves as an important guide for those concerned with tracing the consolidation of power in the new elite that emerged following flag independence in the 1960s.
Source: Publisher
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Master of Poisons
Andrea Hairston
Award-winning author Andrea Hairston weaves together African folktales and postcolonial literature into unforgettable fantasy in Master of Poisons.
The world is changing. Poison desert eats good farmland. Once-sweet water turns foul. The wind blows sand and sadness across the Empire. To get caught in a storm is death. To live and do nothing is death. There is magic in the world, but good conjure is hard to find.
Djola, righthand man and spymaster of the lord of the Arkhysian Empire, is desperately trying to save his adopted homeland, even in exile.
Awa, a young woman training to be a powerful griot, tests the limits of her knowledge and comes into her own in a world of sorcery, floating cities, kindly beasts, and uncertain men.
Awash in the rhythms of folklore and storytelling and rich with Hairston's characteristic lush prose, Master of Poisons is epic fantasy that will bleed your mind with its turns of phrase and leave you aching for the world it burns into being. (From the publisher.) -
Blackness Written, Erased, Rewritten James Weldon Johnson, Teju Cole, and the Palimpsest of Modernity
Daphne Lamothe
Book summary:
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continued relevance in American literature and global culture. -- from back cover
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Passing Strange: Embodying and Negotiating Difference in Academia
Daphne Lamothe
Book summary: In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place? Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across the United States. Whether describing contentious power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity. The collection’s authors are united by their commitment to an ideal of the American university as an inclusive and transformative space, one where students from all backgrounds can simultaneously feel intellectually challenged and personally supported. Yet Transforming the Academy also offers a wide range of perspectives on how to best achieve these goals, a diversity of opinion that is sure to inspire lively debate. Source: Publisher
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Righting/Writing the Black Female Body in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature
Flávia Santos de Araújo
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