Letter from The Director

 

Joel  Cabrita
(Joel Cabrita)

I am delighted to update you on the many exciting activities at the Center for African Studies (CAS) over the past year. This has been a year of progress and optimism for the CAS community. It has also been a year of great challenges, most of all the Covid-19 pandemic. Working with a drastically reduced budget, all our activities have taken place online. Nonetheless, we have worked hard to virtually nurture the community spirit that makes CAS such a unique hub.  

The CAS community has also been deeply affected by the continuing quest for racial justice in the US, often against daunting odds. Our African and African-descended students have expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Conversations about racial justice have been a key component of CAS’s annual Shifting Frames class, founded and led by our CAS Associate Director, Dr. Laura Hubbard. 

In other ways, too, CAS has continued to grow into an important hub for dialogue about Africa and its diaspora. We are delighted to welcome new faculty to Stanford, including Dr. Sarah Derbew, an exciting scholar whose work focuses on literary and cultural representations of Black people in Ancient Greece. 

We also received funding from the Stanford Humanities Center to run a new and highly successful workshop series, “Producing Knowledge in and of Africa.” Exploring issues around the decolonization of knowledge, our discussions have included topics as diverse as the heritage industry in South Africa to the challenges of decolonizing the English Literature “canon”. 

In other exciting news, we inaugurated a new annual lecture series, entitled the “Centering Africa Annual Lecture”. The lecture foregrounds and celebrates prominent thought leaders from Africa and its diaspora. This year the publisher and literary critic, Ellah Wakatama, was our inaugural speaker. She gave a fantastic lecture entitled “We Have New Names” that sketched out an ambitious roadmap for literary publishing in Africa (attended by over 130). We also continued over Zoom our much-beloved Africa Table lunchtime speaker series (a Stanford institution that recently celebrated its 50th birthday). 

Our CAS students have organized some exciting events. We have funded two graduate student-led workshops. One is the Global Black Studies Reading Group, exploring the broad and capacious nature of the field of Black Studies, including a focus on culture, embodiment, and politics. The other workshop, Shaping the Conversation, aims to diversify and deepen conversations around youth politics, healthcare, LGBTQ rights, and FinTech in Africa. 

Also in the area of graduate student support, we launched a competitive advanced graduate student fellowship, the Susan Ford Dorsey Africa Innovation Fellowship. Mindful of the dire state of the academic job market for our advanced students, we hope this Fellowship will be a useful bridging position for CAS students on the cusp of completion. 

Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of CAS’s staff, our Associate Director, Laura Hubbard, and our Program Director, Brenda Mutuma. None of the amazing menu of events listed above would have been possible without them. They have done a huge amount to making CAS continue to be an intellectual and community hub that is both exciting and supportive, that offers both food for thought as well as care for the soul. 

Joel Cabrita

 

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