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Last week’s bitterly contested election in Kenya has placed the country in the international spotlight. Although sitting President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner by the electoral commission, opposition candidate Raila Odinga has refused to concede and contends that the election was stolen from him. After initially rejecting the option, he...
Ongoing opposition to Donald J. Trump’s presidency continues a trend that began during the election campaign: a singular focus on the man and his foibles, as if those who supported him did not get enough of the hashing and rehashing of those same weaknesses before Election Day. Many of us in the opposition are still acting surprised that he is...
Africana Studies at Cornell expresses its condolences to the families of the three people, Heather Heyer, and two public servants, Lt. H. Jay Cullen, and Trooper pilot Berke M.M. Bates, who needlessly lost their lives on Saturday, August 12 as a result of the unlawful actions of members of Nazi and white supremacist organizations in the streets of...
Cornell hosted students from five other universities for the annual Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference April 21-22 on campus.During the conference, students presented formal papers about their research, offered feedback to fellow students and heard from a keynote speaker. This year’s speaker was Krista Thompson...
Amaris Brown, an Africana Studies and Research Center PhD candidate, earned the Biddy Martin Graduate Prize for work on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies for her essay “The Only Truth That Told a Good Story: Pain and Pleasurable Membranes in Marci Blackman's ‘Po Man's Child’ (1999).” The prize is awarded each year by the...
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Dagmawi Woubshet, associate professors of English, discussed their ongoing collaborative project with the public May 3 in Klarman Hall.The conversation, part of the Creative Writing Program’s “In a Word” series, examined the role Van Clief-Stefanon and Woubshet’s friendship has played in their collaborative work....
For almost 20 years, Stacey Langwick, associate professor of anthropology, has conducted research on medicine and healing in East Africa. In a lecture sponsored by the Institute of Comparative Modernities April 11, she explored how concerns over toxicity shape public conversations about the forms of nourishment and modes of healing that make...
In the third grade, Jamila Michener, Government, sent a letter to then New York City mayor David Dinkins asking him what she could do to help her Brooklyn neighborhood. It wasn’t until graduate school, after having long forgotten about the letter, that Michener’s mother showed her a copy of the letter, along with a response from Dinkins’ office...
Africana field faculty member Jamila Michener is quoted in an article on voter turnout:While it’s well known that poor people generally have low turnout, especially in midterm elections, research from Teresa Toguchi Swartz and colleagues at the University of Minnesota found that means-tested, “stigmatizing” forms of social assistance like...
The 42nd Annual Conference of the New York State African Studies Association (NYASA) presented the 2017 Distinguished Africanist Award in Recognition of Outstanding Scholarship to Professor Carole Boyce Davies on March 31, 2017. Professor Boyce Davies has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions. She is the author of...
In the wake of the racist and sexist comments that Bill O’Reilly made about her, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters seems to be getting the last laugh. Last week, sponsors fled his show in response to new revelations of sexual assault claims, and Waters’s voice was resonant and clear in dubbing Fox a “sexual harassment enterprise.” Waters...
Professor RichardsonTR 2:55 – 4:10 PM / 4 creditsBlack women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during the antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers. In this course, we will focus on how black women have...
Professor Hassansh40@cornell.eduM 10:10 – 12:35 PMASRC 4514/6514/ARTH 4514/65144 creditsThis course examines the intersection of Africana/Black Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Although the two fields are often perceived as being distinct from one another, in reality they overlap in significant ways as the result of the immense...
Professor Hassansh40@cornell.eduMW 2:55 – 4:10 PMASRC 3501/ARTH 35104 creditsThis course is a survey of the visual art and material cultural traditions of sub-Saharan Africa. It aims at investigating the different forms of visual artistic traditions in relation to their historical and socio-cultural context. The symbolism and complexity...
Professor Boyce Daviesceb278@cornell.eduTR 2:55-4:10pmASRC 2212/ENGL 2512/LSP 22123 creditsThis introductory course to the study of the Caribbean will begin with examinations of what constitutes the Caribbean and an understanding of Caribbean space. We will then study its peoples, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples,...
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights the network of researchers focused on global Black girlhood, including Associate Professor Oneka LaBennett's On/By Black Women/Black Girls Symposium: The conference, held over a pair of days at the University of Virginia, brought together an array of academics, activists, artists, and...
Five Cornell students will be spending the summer in Tanoso, Ghana through a service-learning program with the nonprofit Voices of African Mothers in the hopes of establishing a “long-lasting legacy of empowerment, education and equality in Ghana and beyond,” according to Blake Brown ’17, program facilitator and former participant.This four-year...
Professor Oneka LaBennett recently received an Engaged Opportunity Grant from Engaged Cornell. The grant was awarded to the team LaBennett will lead, comprised of community partner, CaribBEING ( a cultural/arts non-profit in Brooklyn), Elena Guzman (Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology), and the students enrolled in LaBennett’s “Engaging NYC: Oral...
“The history of the Negro is the history of America, and it is not a pretty story,” says the late writer James Baldwin in director Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.”The 2016 film is based on Baldwin’s recollections of the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. A friend, intimate and comrade of all...
In light of the executive order issued on immigration, and its impact on Cornell students, staff, and faculty, Global Cornell has put together a webpage of resources and information, which will be updated as the situation changes and new resources are identified. Currently the page includes:excerpt/link to President Rawlings's university...
Russell Rickford, associate professor of history and Africana field member, reflects on - and challenges - the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The King you know never existed. He is a fraud. An imposter.This King was manufactured. He was designed to validate and preserve the status quo. To mislead and pacify. He is a device. An ornament. An...
Hundreds of seldom-seen photographs documenting the journey of African-Americans from the slavery era to the 20th century are now digitized and freely accessible to students and scholars around the world.The Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs, part of Beth and Stephan Loewentheil’s 2012 donation of photography to Cornell...
“We have to be disruptive and mobilize,” said the 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate. “We have to continue to say we will be ungovernable and what that looks like to this type of government.”Clemente stressed the the need for activism outside the electoral system, demanding that activists reject “any call to understand and collaborate...
Reverend Sekou Osagyefo, a Black Lives Matter activist, theologian and musician, spoke on campus to address the role of artists in times of terror, as The Cornell Daily Sun reports:“What is the role of the artist, the task of the artist, in the time of monsters?” he began.“While monsters spew foul words, the artist does not delight in such...
Africana Associate Professor Noliwe Rooks comments on the history of Atlanta in civil rights, and the precariousness of hard-won laws, in the Christian Science Monitor.“Yes, you can win rights, but protecting those rights is as important as winning them,” says Noliwe Rooks, an American studies professor at Cornell University and a graduate of...