Overview
Sophia Jahadhmy is a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell. Sophia seeks to examine the dynamics of settlement, territoriality, and cohabitation between diverse populations that coexisted in Dar es Salaam before colonialism in order to theorize the plausibility of cosmopolitanism today. This work also seeks to understand how the Pan-African project inherits these cosmopolitan life forms that existed in many parts of Africa before the colonial injection of forms of governance that fixed ethnicity, territoriality, and configurations of sovereignty. Central to this project is thus a rearticulation of Pan-Africanism as world re-making through the memory of living differently through non-hegemonic exchange and an ethics of encounter and cohabitation that nurtured an openness to receiving and being received by the Other in the southwest Indian Ocean. Sophia graduated with degrees in Africana and International Studies with honors from Vassar College. Her senior thesis, which won the award for best thesis in both departments, attends to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s literary cartography of cohabitation, violence, and historical misrecognition on the Swahili Coast to revisit the intimate and haunting connections between Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan world and territoriality, autochthony, and postcoloniality.
Publications
Jahadhmy, S. (2024) 'Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship?' in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. 31 No. 1/2 (2023)
Available at: jffp.org