U of M African American and African Studies

Sign up for AFRO 1201! Available on schedule builder 12/19 📚📖

Search “SWAH“ on schedule builder and enroll in our Spring 2025 Swahili courses at the UMN 🌍

Search “AFRO 3910” on Schedule Builder and sign up for Oromo Language. The course is a pilot for spring 2025.

[repost] Join us for our Empowering Wadajiraka event!! Together let’s celebrate the rich Somali Heritage that strengthens our diverse campus and enriches the Minnesota community. RSVP by November 10th, we hope to see you there!

Help Prof. Josef Woldense in the Afro Dept and take the following survey!

Come to our open house! Get free books, enjoy African cuisine and meet our department staff 🌍📚🎉

Come enjoy free donuts & coffee with the Afro Dept! Go to the Social Science Building [West Bank] and come to the 8th Floor!! ☕️📚

Interested in learning Swahili? Classes are open for registration until Sep 16! Look up SWAH in Schedule Builder 🌍📚

Take a look at our new Graduate Seminar coming this Fall 2024!! This class is taught by our new instructor, Professor Rahsaan Mahadeo. Sign up for AFRO 8910!!

Course Description: “What time is it?” is a seemingly benign question asked to orient a person to time and space. The banality of the question, though, should not excuse what are arguably serious onto-epistemological limitations. Rather than using an adjective (i.e., “what”), it is more generative to use a determiner (e.g., “whose”). Asking “Whose time is it?” exposes the possibility that some may own time, while others can only owe it. Not only does the question help distinguish between time’s owners and borrowers, but it opens up space for explanations of temporal and capitalist exploitation. If time is money, will the end of time mark the end of capitalism? And, if all capitalism is racial capitalism, then all time must be racial time. Is it then possible to conceive of the abolition of time as a commitment to black liberation and anti-capitalism? This graduate seminar directly engages these questions as a key analytic to examine dispossession, capitalism and racial capitalism, industrialization and “postindustrialism,” black liberation, colonial relations of space and time, etc.

Follow umnafro or email [email protected] for more information!!

Here is another course coming this Fall 2024, taught by our new hire Professor Ana Cláudia Saõ Bernardo. Sign up!!

Course Description: The second half of the 20 th century witnessed, in the literary arena,
an explosion of writing by black women in Africa and its diasporas. But although there has been
an increasing interest in these women’s writings, it can hardly be said that they occupy a central
place in literary and critical theory. This course seeks to explore black female literary voices
from Africa and its diasporas. Topics of particular interest will include, though not limited to,
colonial patriarchy and the erosion of traditional values, the dynamics of gender in postcolonial
contexts, the intersections between the public and private spheres in women’s narratives, the
struggle to negotiate gender, racial, class boundaries, national memory and national identity in
women’s writings on displacement, as well as women’s agency through spatial/social mobility.

Sign up for our Fall course AFRO 1903!!!

Course Description:

China’s ascendancy as an economic and political global power has been the subject of much scholarly and political debate. Specifically, China’s renewed interest in Africa continues to beg the question, what is China’s Africa strategy or Africa-China strategy? Some scholars have suggested that China’s strategic interests in Africa are purely economic, more specifically, resource extraction and exploitation, which has led to renewed concerns of neo-colonialism! Other questions that have been raised include how this engagement will benefit the African countries engaged with China. This course seeks to examine/explore these issues and better understand how China’s engagement in Africa may have lasting consequences for the continent’s future.

This course will explore grassroots struggles of black people on the African continent, the United States, and in the Caribbean. More specifically, this course examines the various responses of African-Americans to the events in Africa that relate directly to colonialism.

Join us at the Bell Museum for a screening of Blackwaters: Brotherhood in the Wild and a chance to meet the cast. Presented by University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources, in partnership with the Bell Museum, Minneapolis Parks Foundation, Melanin in Motion, and several University partner.

Blackwaters encompasses the power of 5 Black men whose paths have been challenged with loss, defeat, fear, pain, and the social injustices Black men and Black boys face every day. Through surviving life’s trials, each man has found grace and success in the outdoors, healed and mended by nature’s medicine, embracing the art of fly fishing and building brotherhood. The film highlights their journey through the Gates of the Arctic Circle National Park and follows their adventures and dialogue as they learn to hold space in nature as anglers paving the road for the next generation.

Event information can be found here: https://forestry.umn.edu/events/blackwaters-film

(This event is free with registration)

Happy Friday!! Here is another course you should look into for your Fall 2024 Registration! Black Northern & Central Europe, taught by Dr. Watkins. Scan the QR code and take a look.

Have a good weekend!

We’ve got something cooking….🤭

[FREE EVENT] Join us for a Job Talk and Lunch Discussion this Thursday April 4th!!

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Providence College. She has an MA and PhD in Lusophone Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a BA Comparative Literature from the UNESP in São Paulo, Brazil.

[FREE EVENT] Interested in archaeology? Dr. Alicia Odewale, CEO of Anthropology Rewritten, LLC and adjunct assistant professor at Rice University, will speak on African archaeology. Her research focuses on African heritage in the US and Caribbean, including the US Virgin Islands and her native state of Oklahoma.

Here is the second batch of our FALL 2024 Courses! Start thinking about registration coming up in April 2024!! DM or email us at [email protected] for any questions!!