Department of African and African American Studies

We are very pleased to welcome Professor Rachel Klein, who will be a Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in three academic units. Kay two-year postdoctoral fellowships are shared by multiple programs and departments, allowing us to discover and deepen interdisciplinary capacities across the Brandeis curriculum. This particular Kay Fellowship was proposed, and will be shared by the AAAS Department, the English Department, and the Legal Studies Program. Professor Klein studies carceral social movements, with a special focus on the “insurgent kinship” of incarcerated women’s activism, and their cross-generational solidarity, in California. She organizes with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Here on campus, she will also work with the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. We are delighted that this Fall she will teach “Carceral Studies,” AAAS/WGS 122a, a course that was introduced into the curriculum by Professor Anya Wallace. Professor Klein has just completed her PhD studies at the University of Southern California. Congratulations, and welcome to Brandeis! 

Professor Shoniqua Roach has recently published “To Put Afoot A New Black Woman: On Hortense Spillers and the Possibilities of Gender” in the journal boundary 2 (Vol 51, 1: February 2024); edited the special Issue on Evelyn Hammonds, “Inside the Black (W)hole” in the journal differences (35, 2: Sept 2024), which includes her own contribution, “Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective”; and she has an essay entitled “The Black Living Room” in the new volume The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press), edited by Margo Crawford C. Riley Snorton and

Professor Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso served as one of the Program Chairs for the 2024 meeting of the African Studies Association in Chicago, this past December. The theme was “Global Africa.”

Professor Panashe Chigumadzi is our newest AAAS faculty member. She is teaching her first courses at Brandeis this semester: AAAS Senior Capstone Seminar (AAAS 189a) and What is Apartheid? (AAAS 139A). Her dissertation, “19^th-Century Ubuntu: Black Philosophy Under the Nine Warrs of Dispossession, 1779-1878,” is based on hundreds of newspaper articles in isiXhosa-, isiZulu-, seTswana-, and seSotho-language newspapers, and argues that Ubuntu philosophy provided an ethics of “conquest and incorporation” for Southern Africa’s indigenous peoples. Dr. Chigumadzi is an interdisciplinary historian of 19^th and 20^th-century Africa, and of global Black intellectual, political, philosophical and religious traditions in the wake of struggles against war, land dispossession, slavery, imperialism colonialism and capitalism across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. She holds a PhD from Harvard University’s Deparrtment of African and African American Studies, and an MA in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her historical memoir These Bones Will Rise Again (2018, about Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup, was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 novel Sweet Medicine won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. She was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid in South Africa, and she has been a columnist, contributing editor or had her essays published in the New York Times, the Johannesburg Review of Books, The [London] Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Zieit, Chimurenga, The Sunday Times, City Press, Africa is a Country, and Transition. 

Professor Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso has just released her recent book, "African Refugees."

"African Refugees" is a comprehensive overview of the context, causes and consequences of refugee lives, discussing issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees around the world. It covers overarching topics such as human rights, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions, as well as less-studied topics such as refugee youths, refugee camps, LGBTQ refugees, urban refugees and refugee women. It also takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees. "African Refugees" recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time but avoids the pitfalls of the colonial gaze — where refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems — seeking to complicate these narratives by recognizing African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial and neo-colonial systems of power.

Professor Chad Williams is releasing his latest book on April 4 — "The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War"

When W.E.B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to close ranks and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished.

In "The Wounded World," Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois’s failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois’s struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century. Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois' largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois and why it continues to matter today.

Professor Faith Smith is releasing her latest book in April 2023 — "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early 20th Century."

In "Strolling in the Ruins," Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades.

Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-20th century and anticipates the Caribbean's present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems and novels to newspapers, photographs and gardens to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa's place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.