AFR 249
Penning the Path: Writing and Publishing Black Studies Spring 2024
Division II
Cross-listed GBST 249 / AMST 250
This is not the current course catalog

Since the mid-20th century, Black intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora have founded seminal journals within and beyond academic boundaries. Despite being separated by global distances and different contexts, these initiatives have decisively contributed to the emergence and consolidation of Black and Pan-African studies. Presence Africaine, founded in Paris in 1947 by Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop; Quilombo, first published in 1948 by the Afro-Brazilian intellectual Abdias do Nascimento; and The Black Scholar, founded in California in 1969 by Robert Chrisman, Nathan Hare, and Allan Ross are just a few groundbreaking examples. From this global perspective, students will explore these and other cornerstone journals which paved the way for the emergence of Black and Pan-African Studies in the US and abroad. Additionally, the course aims to encourage students to be part of a collective effort to relaunch Kaleido[scopes]: Diaspora Re-imagined, a student led-journal created in 2014 in the Africana Studies Department by Sevonna Brown (’15), Ahmad Greene-Hayes (’16), and Nneka Dennie (’13). Students will receive guidance and mentoring to conceive and write articles, essays, audiovisual creations, and interviews with students and intellectuals from the African continent and the Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.