In honor of Black History Month, we invite you to recognize the contributions African Americans have made to our world, and discover groundbreaking scholarship stemming from the African Diaspora. Enjoy the following sample articles for free from our African Studies journals.
Africa Today is at the forefront in publishing Africanist, reform-minded research and provides multicultural scholarly work from around the world on a full range of political, economic, and social issues.
Dangerous Crossings: Voices from the African Migration to Italy/Europe
Africans continue to migrate across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, where tens of thousands have drowned. In Libya, many suffer enslavement and other harsh treatment as they flee persecution or poverty, or both. Yet there have been few studies of their journey. This study, based primarily on some sixty interviews by the author in 2014–2016 with African migrants in Italy and France, provides a portrait of resilience, courage, and strategic decisions that differs sharply from media images of helplessness. It suggests reconsidering migrant networks and typologies in view of the breakdown and attempted repair of networks on these journeys, where categories blur, ranging from free to slave and back to free.
African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review (ACPR) is an interdisciplinary forum for creative and rigorous studies of conflict and peace in Africa and for discussions between scholars, practitioners, and public intellectuals in Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world.
Armed Rebellion, Violent Extremism, and the Challenges of International Intervention in Mali
The French-led military intervention and the UN peacekeeping mission in northern Mali have helped preserve Mali's territorial integrity. However, international interventions have had mixed outcomes in the areas of security, human rights, and humanitarian assistance. Similarly, there has not been much success in eradicating jihadist terrorism or in reconciling the country's North and South. This article argues that the limited achievements of the international interventions in Mali's complex conflict are largely due to the incompatible agendas and assumptions of the stakeholders, which have led to greater focus of international actors on state-centric security and governance matters at the expense of identity issues.
Black Camera is a journal of black film studies, edited at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University-Bloomington, and engenders an academic discussion of black film production, including historical and contemporary book and film reviews, interviews with accomplished film professionals, and editorials on the development of black creative culture.
Queen Bey and the New Niggerati: Ethics of Individualism in the Appropriation of Black Radicalism
This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture. Their promotion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shift in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé's hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cultural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé's fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ultimately sustain her personal empire.
Black Diaspora Review provides an open access forum for scholarly critiques, debates, and discussions on every aspect of Black Diaspora studies.
To Be a Black Woman, a Lesbian, and an Afro-Feminist in Cuba Today
To be a Black lesbian woman and poor involves the recognition of many more intersections that have to be included in the conceptualization of this body that has been formed as a result of exploitation. It is not only the fight against subordination to men, nor patriarchy, Black women also have to consider the particular experiences that they have to live. The poverty that the majority of Black women face is more complex and we have to address and render visible these realities. We carry with us a difficult history, one that we have had to face in private. Because of this we take on the role of a strong black woman amid experiences of submission and prejudice.
The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization on issues of the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernity and postmodernity, diasporas and resistance and counter discourse.
Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece(1911), has typically focused on questions of genre—the interplay of romance, realism, and naturalism—and, more recently, the influence of Du Bois's early sociological studies and his burgeoning socialism. Building on this scholarship, this essay explores an often overlooked aspect of the novel and of Du Bois's early work more generally: the afterlife of the plantation in the cotton South. Suggesting that Du Bois often turned to the black South in his literary works to imagine otherwise, the author analyzes Quest as an “anti-plantation romance” that at once establishes and undercuts the plantation as both a political and socioeconomic formation and a literary genre. Through romance and aesthetics, the author contends, Du Bois reimagines the relationship between blackness and cotton within global capitalism. In so doing, Du Bois attempts to extract cotton and the black female body from the entanglements of the plantation's political and libidinal economies to imagine a new socioeconomic order for southern African Americans—a “cotton future”—that undercuts the violent and exploitative logics undergirding plantation modernity. The essay concludes by demonstrating how Quest anticipates Du Bois's later thought on cotton, the plantation romance, and black southern futures in his 1946 speech, “Behold the Land” and his proposed 1954/56 book project, “The Cotton Slave,” which aimed to illuminate the inextricability of slavery, cotton, and American capitalism. What, asks the author, does reading Quest alongside “The Cotton Slave” reveal about the relationship between literature (e.g. the [anti-]plantation romance) and the history of American capitalism in Du Bois's writings and beyond.
Mande Studies is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research that focuses on the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa and the Mande community in diaspora, from slavery to the post-colony.
This article examines the rise of an organization of Northern Malians living in Bamako during the crisis in 2012–2013, the Collectif des Ressortissants du Nord (COREN), run by Northern executive civil servants and political leaders. It presents a little-known aspect of the Malian crisis: the strong anti-rebellion and anti-jihadist views widely shared among Northerners - mostly Songhay and Fulani - living in Bamako at the time. The article suggests that COREN's nationalism differed from Southern nationalism, as it was informed by the complex relationship between Northern Mali and the State, and that it was rooted in a specific history of integration of Northern people - mostly Songhay - in the State apparatus since the colonial period. It discusses the ethnic and territorial identification of COREN in order to draw a complex picture of the anti-rebellion stance in Bamako during the crisis.
Meridians provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts and recognizes that feminism, race, transnationalism, and women of color are contested terms and engages in a dialogue across ethnic and national boundaries.
While many branches of science have sought to understand—and to even cure—human bigotry, and thereby cure the deleterious results thereof, the champion most likely to prevail in this quest is the hybrid child of art and science: the literary and cinematic genre of science fiction. From its mixed literary heritage to its inability to be summarized by a catchall definition to its endlessly elastic point of view, science fiction is uniquely suited to the herculean task of allowing our species to experience, understand, and accept the varied ways in which people express what it means to be human.
Research in African Literatures is the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide and provides a forum in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa.
Migratory movements and questions of both forced and voluntary mobilities and immobilities of individuals and communities seem to dominate recent global political, juridical, sociological, and cultural debates. These phenomena are considered to be a specific signum of the present age. At the same time, the accentuation of their contemporaneity tends to disguise awareness of migratory movements being as old as humanity itself. This special issue of Research in African Literatures focuses on these matters through the lens of perspectives articulated by Hispano- and Catalano-African authors in their writings. These reflections, however, cannot be reduced to mere illustrations of the discourse on migration(s) of and within a lived reality but have to be acknowledged as complementing those positions as much as they challenge or even destabilize predominant paradigms.
Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men is a multidisciplinary research journal whose articles will focus on issues related to aspects of Black men’s experiences, including such topics as gender, masculinities, and race/ethnicity.
Caregiver stereotypes typically favor a mother's parenting style, due to which a father's parental contribution is often undervalued. While fathers from many cultures are affected by the preference for female parenting styles, Black males are especially troubled by negative preconceived norms. Could the fact that, traditionally, men have only been given space to parent through play be the reason that parental contributions of fathers, in general, and Black fathers, in particular, are not valued equally, especially with regard to schooling? The aim of the present study was thus to examine the effect of African American fathering involvement and the resulting educational outcomes of their children utilizing interviews and video clip reflections. The study sample was comprised of six African American fathers aged 33–58 with children aged 0–25. The results revealed three themes, namely (1) the importance of teamwork as crucial to the role of a Black father; (2) the use of different strategies based on their child's personality to best engage with them as a parent as well as homework assistance; and (3) using play, either as a physical activity or as part of a learning objective, which also included physical activity such as sports. Play thus had a key and interrelated role in fostering positive educational outcomes in the three areas of fathering involvement: accessibility, engagement, and responsibility.
Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate.
Parade of Champions: The Failure of Black Queer Grief
Parade of Champions is a three-channel video installation based on interviews Michèle Pearson Clarke conducted with three black queer people about their grief experiences, following the recent deaths of their mothers. In conceptualizing the form of this work, Clarke sought to create an immersive environment, both literally and figuratively, in which she could ask the viewer to sit in the gallery and serve as witness to black queer grief. The installation is thus composed of three large images projected perpendicularly and in close proximity to each other, accompanied by an audio documentary soundtrack transmitted into the gallery space.
From studies on African conflict and peace to dialogues on race and ethnicity, our journals in African and African-American studies actively work to break down stereotypes and focus on the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people.
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