Africana Studies Commons^™

Sahel Region In French Postcolonial Discourse: Macron's Production Of Space And Security Rhetoric, Azzahrah F. A Putri, Abellia Anggi Wardani Dr.

International Review of Humanities Studies

Between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanese Savannah, the Sahel region has become a contested geopolitical space. This study analyses how France is reconstructing its hegemony following its military withdrawal through the rhetoric of Emmanuel Macron (2021 and 2025). Using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995) and the theory of spatial production (Lefebvre, 1974), this study examines how the discourses of “partnership” and “security” are employed to maintain French influence. Qualitative methods were applied to Macron's speeches, French media, and statements by former presidents of Sahel countries. The results show that France is redefining the Sahel as a ‘crisis zone’ requiring …

Entry Nr. 487 Kossola, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 134 Isaac Anderson, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Racial Capitalism And Black Maritime Geography In 19th Century Portland, Maine, Jeremy Harrison

Honors Theses

Portland, Maine, is located on the rocky shores of the Atlantic Ocean and has served as home to a diverse population that has benefited from the economic and social aspects of the shipping and trading industry. This port city in one of the northernmost regions of the United States was one of the last stops for ships carrying goods before reaching the city centers of the Americas and Europe. As a result, during the late 18th and early to mid-19th centuries, skilled and unskilled Black laborers from somewhat fringe regions within the Atlantic migrated to Portland in search of not …

Social Safety And Social Security: Validating Context-Specific Instruments For Slums, Liss D. Romero, Katherine Palacio, Zacheous Ako Abang, Valeria Silgado, Humberto Llinas, Leidy González, Erika Frydenlund, Daniel Bolivar, Jose J. Padilla

VMASC Publications

Social safety and social security are concepts that help explain a community's well-being by assessing how it manages and mitigate existing, or perceived, risks. However, these terms are often conflated, which can limit understanding, particularly in areas with unstable living conditions. This study explores both concepts in the context of residents living in slums. As the number of displaced people grows, slums and informal settlements are becoming increasingly common worldwide, making it essential to clarify these concepts. Residents of slums face numerous hazards, including crime, violence, inadequate housing, overcrowding, and limited access to essential services. To measure social safety and …

Presidential Slaves: The Story Of Black People In The Lives Of Antebellum U.S. Presidents, Nika Davis

History Dissertations

The historical narrative about American slavery included many topics such as the African slave trade, the Middle Passage, slave culture, rebellions, religion, and abolition.  This study revealed more information to be examined in the record of American slavery relating to the presidents of the United States and their enslaved laborers.  This oversight proved prevalent during the years leading to the American Civil War from 1820-1860.  Therefore, this dissertation focused upon the enslaved and free Black people who intersected with the presidents and their friends, political acquaintances, and family.  By studying their lives, this dissertation revealed that the slaves associated with …

Imagined Afterlives: Anti-Black Medical Violences In Contemporary Black Arts, Katie Schadler

Honors Theses

“Imagined Afterlives: Anti-Black Medical Violences in Contemporary Black Arts” is a multi-genre exploration that studies the following works: Venus (1996) by Suzan Lori Parks, Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele, and Dawn (1987) by Octavia Butler. I respectively study an experimental play, a psychological horror film, and a speculative novel to understand how Black creatives are depicting and responding to anti-Black violences, particularly medical violences. This work brings together Black art spanning from the late 1980s to 2017 as well as historical events and figures from the eighteenth century all the way to a not-so-distant future. While these works defamiliarize …

Entrepreneuring Otherwise: Reimagining Value In Art Business At Ɛdan, The Ano Institute Of Arts And Knowledge, And Nubuke Wa, Chantel Thompson

MA in Art Business Dissertations

This dissertation examines how three Ghanaian women-led art institutions practise what this study terms “entrepreneuring otherwise”: a feminist and decolonial mode of enterprise grounded in care, community, and epistemic sovereignty. Focussing on Ɛdan, ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, and Nubuke Wa, the research investigates how they navigate their environments, illustrating the strategies used to respond to both the rich cultural histories of Ghana and the systemic conditions shaped by limited state support, fragmented cultural policy, and predominantly informal economies, which ultimately create fertile ground for reimagining and innovation.

Situated within feminist epistemologies and decolonial thought, the study applies the …

From Policy To Practice: Strengthening Black Intellectual Engagement In Psu’S Resr Curriculum, Chantell Wesley

Anthós

This article examines how Portland State University’s Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice (RESR) requirement, while framed as an institutional commitment to equity and inclusion, can inadvertently reproduce White Language Supremacy within Black Studies classrooms. The central question guiding this analysis is how general education equity mandates shape the pedagogical and linguistic conditions of discipline-specific courses, particularly when those courses are positioned as service spaces for non-majors. I argue that RESR implementation often shifts instructional emphasis toward students less familiar with Black intellectual traditions, thereby displacing disciplinary rigor and marginalizing Black students’ intellectual labor.

Methodologically, this study draws on autoethnographic reflection …

Erasing The Artist, Policing The City: Michael Stewart And New York’S War On Graffiti, Vladislav Kirilov

Anthós

The 1983 death of Michael Stewart, a young Black graffiti artist, exposes the violent logic at the center of New York City’s War on Graffiti. Under Mayor Ed Koch and the rise of broken windows policing, graffiti was framed as a racialized symbol of disorder used to justify intensified control of public space. Rather than becoming political in this moment, graffiti is understood here as an already politicized form of expression shaped by racial and spatial inequality. The article examines how Stewart’s killing made police violence visible, provoking responses from artists, activists, and graffiti writers while revealing the human costs …

"It Can't Just Be One": Canadian Black Youth Perspectives On Representation And Belongings In Public Libraries, Amber Matthews, Sandie Thomas

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This study employed narrative inquiry and critical race approaches to explore Black youth's perceptions and experiences of Canadian public library programs and materials. In response to calls in Canada's Anti-Racism Strategy (2024) and Ontario's Anti-Black Racism Strategy (2025) for social service institutions to address anti-Black racism, the research examined Black youth experiences in public libraries and how these experiences relate to anti-Black racism in education and social service settings. The study was conducted in London, Ontario, with Black youth aged 13 to 24 and parents of youth using a community-based participatory research approach in partnership with the Where We Are …

Digital Griots Playing Lottery Tickets: A Study Of Hip Hop And Social Transformation In Ghana's #Fixthecountry Movement, Jaime M. Kowlessar

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

On June 28, 2021, activist Ibrahim Mohammed (Macho Kaaka) was murdered in Ejura, Ghana, after using social media to criticize government failures. When protesters demanding justice were shot by security forces, politically engaged Ghanaian hip hop artists refused silence, contributing to Ghana’s #FixTheCountry movement—the nation’s largest youth mobilization in a generation. Yet scholarly debates about how hip hop contributes to social change remain unresolved, divided between those celebrating its activist potential and those critiquing its limitations. This dissertation introduces the lottery ticket theory as an alternative framework for understanding cultural activism’s relationship to political transformation. Rather than asking whether hip …

From Deference To Dialogue: How International Gtas From High Power Distance Cultures Adapt To U.S. Classroom Dynamics, Deborah Akua Afi Appiah

Theses and Dissertations

International graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) from high power distance cultures play a significant role in undergraduate education at U.S. universities, yet they face challenges that go well beyond language proficiency. Coming from educational backgrounds where teacher authority is unquestioned and hierarchical, these GTAs must navigate American classrooms that operate on fundamentally different assumptions, where authority is earned rather than assumed, informality is the norm, and students expect to question, negotiate, and be personally known by their instructors. The present study examined how eighteen (18) international GTAs from seven (7) high power distance countries perceived and adapted to these differences while …

Kalunga Crossings: Waterscapes Of Terror And "Teachment" In The African Atlantic World, Dianne M. Stewart, Tracey E. Hucks, Solimar Otero

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In this article, we think alongside historian of religions Charles H. Long to analyze the relationship between water and empire, explore theoretical approaches to water and modernity, and probe the significance of water in Africana ecologies and spiritual cultures, highlighting its suggestive contributions to restorative epistemologies of ecological co-habitation. Our investigation advances an Africana religious framework of “waterscapes of terror and ‘teachment’” that centers diaspora bodies of water as loci for analyzing history, materiality, and ecological regard. Teachment is an anti-colonial linguistic irruption, an all-encompassing term for Africana pedagogies and epistemologies that defy antiblack and anti-African colonial instruction. Examining how …

Discursive And Ideological Issues Foregrounding The Attitudinal Conceptualization Of Yahoo Yahoo (Internet Fraud) In Selected Nigerian Comedy Skits, Temitope Michael Ajayi, Aishat Lare Husseini

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Cybercrime, Yahoo Yahoo in the Nigerian context, has emerged as one of the major issues the global space is currently facing, and as such has received scholarly attention, mostly from the sociological, anthropological, and legal perspectives, but very scant attention from linguistics. From alinguistic perspective, this study thus investigates the discursive-ideological issues foregrounding Nigerians’ attitudinal orientation towards Yahoo Yahoo (Internet Fraud) as portrayed in selected Nigerian comedy skits. Data comprised four purposively selected comedy skits by Lasisi Elenu and Prince Tgb downloaded from their social media pages (YouTube and TikTok). With analytical insight from van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of ideology, …

Star Wars: Andor – An Abolitionist Study Guide, Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

This study guide provides a set of activities for teaching abolition through Season 1 of the speculative fiction TV series Star Wars: Andor (2022). Through the practice of critical literacy (viewing, reading, and analysis), we offer various ideas on how to engage Andor as a relevant pedagogical tool for studying and teaching abolitionist movement histories and methodologies. By guiding students through a critical analysis of this widely-circulated, mainstream cultural text, we seek to activate an abolitionist pedagogical lens that can be applied across various genres and media – making tangible connections between popular culture and political struggles writ large. These …

The Interplay Of Morphology, Syntax, And Semantics In Kuria Verb Extensions Within The Mara Region, Mary Charwi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Verb extension morphological affixes that significantly alter verb meaning are a defining characteristic of Bantu languages. This paper investigates the morphosyntactic behaviour, semantic implications, and functional roles of extensions within Kuria, a Bantu language of Tanzania. The study adopts Hyman’s morphocentric approach, specifically the CARP template (Causative-Applicative-Reciprocal-Passive), as its foundational framework to test whether Kuria adheres to this pan-Bantu default ordering. The data were collected in Tarime District (2014-2015) using a mixed methods approach, comprising questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and video stimuli with 13 rural and urban speakers, and text analysis (the Kuria Bible). Through rigorous morphosyntactic parsing, the analysis reveals …

Resilience In African History, Cymone Fourshey

Faculty Journal Articles

Between 1960, when seventeen African countries gained independence from French colonial rule, and 2020, when the global pandemic of Covid-19 emerged, just over five hundred scholarly books or articles were published addressing, to varying degrees, resilience on the African continent. Working toward this special issue has made it clear that there continues to be a great deal of slippage in how scholars describe resilience. This concept is often conflated with terms such as “resistance,” “persistence,” and “endurance.” While these do express ways humans respond to adversity, they are distinct from resilience, which is rooted in adaptation not opposition.1 Some people …

Israeli Hasbara And The Nba’S Palestine Exception: The Impossibility Of Capitalist “Social Justice”, Chen Chen, Anthony J. Weems, Roc Rochon, Daniel Sailofsky

Sport Management Collection

Sport is a notable site for the Israeli state in its hasbara (public diplomacy, or “explaining”) effort that seeks to normalize the conditions of ethnic cleansing, illegal settlement, and apartheid practices in historic and occupied Palestine. Against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza and the lack of international sport sanctions against Israeli teams, this paper maps several hasbara activities/attempts featuring the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the last decade. This is a worthwhile case, not least because of the NBA’s self-branding as a socially “progressive” league composed of a primarily Black/African American athletic workforce. Two major observations are made: …

"That Was Something I Had To Get Used To”: Communication Challenges Of African Graduate Teaching Assistants, Mohammed Hafiz Nabila

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study examined the communication challenges and adaptive strategies of African Graduate Teaching Assistants (AGTAs) in U.S. higher education, focusing on East Tennessee State University. The study aimed to understand how AGTAs navigate linguistic, cultural, and institutional barriers in their teaching roles. Using semi-structured interviews with seven participants, data were analyzed through thematic analysis to identify key patterns and meanings. Findings revealed challenges related to accents, cultural adjustment, and limited institutional preparation. Faculty mentorship played a vital role in shaping AGTAs’ confidence, interpretation of challenges, and professional growth. However, lack of support often led to isolation and self-doubt. The …