voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
voices of the diaspora
Boston College’s African and African Diaspora Studies Program
news, events, and resources pertaining to african and african diaspora studies at boston college
After Sixteen Year Hiatus, Blacks in Boston Conference Returns
Message from the Director
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Boston College’s Black Studies
Program hosted a series of conferences on the history and lived realities
of people of African descent in Boston—conferences of such high profile that they attracted prominent figures to deliver keynote addresses,
including historians Lerone Bennett Jr. and John Hope Franklin, civil
rights activist and politician Eleanor Holmes Norton, and journalist and
narrative non-fiction writer Alex Haley. Last held in 2000, the conference will return to the Heights in April 2016.
Held in April 1983, the first conference, “Blacks in Metropolitan
Boston,” was organized by the late Amanda V. Houston, the Black Studies Program’s first director, and a twenty-eight person planning committee. Nearly ten years removed from the conflicts over busing and concerned that the “vision of multicultural education for all students that
was a legacy of the 1960s” was disappearing from Boston schools, Houston and her colleagues set out to celebrate the history of communities of
African descent in Boston, Cambridge, Medford, and Newton. But unlike
most academic conferences, the conveners wanted “Blacks in Metropolitan Boston” to have a significant public scholarship dimension. One of
their intended audiences was secondary school teachers. They wanted to
recuperate local black history that local black educators could integrate
into their curriculum.
But the public scholarship dimension went beyond this. The
conveners also reached out to black churches and social welfare organizations. They envisioned the conference providing a practical service—teaching skills so that attendees could collect, preserve, and write
the histories of their own families, institutions, and neighborhoods. The
public history aspect of the conference was additionally represented by
the cosponsorship of the Museum of Afro-American History—which
also curated an exhibit on blacks in nineteenth-century Boston that was
displayed on campus—and its cohosting by Charles Street AME Church
in Roxbury, which was celebrating its 150th anniversary.
In many ways, this
past year has been one of
new beginnings. I became
the director of the program
in the summer of 2014,
taking over after four years
of excellent leadership
by Professor Rhonda
Frederick. I am thankful
for the commitment that
she and Professor Cynthia
Young have made over the
past ten years to create and
maintain such a robust
and relevant minor and
an intellectually vibrant
community of scholars and
students. Another important
change for the program is
that we have been joined
by Professor Anjali Vats,
who holds a joint position
with the Department of
Communication, and who,
through her research focus
on the rhetoric of race in law
and popular culture, adds an
important dimension to the
program’s curriculum.
by AADS Staff
continued on page 6
by Martin Summers
continued on page 5
at a glance
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Reflections on My Time as an AADS Minor
AVH Fellows Travel to Ghana and Haiti
AADS Minors Finalist and Recipient of Oscar A. Romero Scholarship
2015-2016 New Directions in African Diaspora Studies Lecture Series
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voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
Reflections on My Time as an AADS Minor
By Grace West
When I arrived in Chestnut Hill from North Carolina in the fall of 2011, I knew nothing of the
African and African Diaspora Studies Program. I declared myself a sociology major, then switched
to history in the spring of my freshman year. In the fall of my sophomore year, two classes - African
American Writers with Cynthia Young and Gender and Sexuality in African American History with Martin
Summers - prompted me to declare a minor in AADS. That decision in October of 2012 was, undoubtedly,
the most important decision I made at BC.
I was attracted to the interdisciplinary nature of AADS, and relished the ability to move beyond my
major into other departments. I loved how my classes interconnected in ways that began to capture the
complexity of the diaspora. As I studied the photography of James Van Der Zee in concert with the history
of the Harlem Renaissance, or the works of Toni Morrison alongside the history of American slavery and
the sociological framework of intersectionality, my education felt truly integrated and well-rounded for the
first time in my life.
I loved how AADS shifted and expanded the conventional canon, centering the marginal in
transformative ways that forever reoriented my approach to the history and culture of the world in
which we live. In my freshman year Western Cultural Tradition class, I studied the works of thinkers
such as Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, and the apostle Paul and often found them irrelevant
to contemporary society. In my AADS classes, on the other hand, I eagerly studied the works of thinkers
such as Frederick Douglass, bell hooks, James
Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Angela Davis,
Julius Nyerere, Frantz Fanon, and Chimamanda
The AADS Program at BC has
Adichie and was exposed to a body of thought
helped me grow enormously as
often repressed at universities like Boston
both a student and a human being.
College.
My AADS classes and professors have
I feel well equipped to enter ‘adultbeen my favorite at BC, but more significantly,
hood’ as an informed, educated,
they’ve been the most important. They’ve asked
the questions that went overlooked in other
and active citizen.
courses, initiated discussions that extended
far beyond the classroom, provided me with
intelligent and inspiring classmates, and forced me to consider my position within society and within
the world at large more than any other class. I am eternally thankful to the AADS program for working
to correct the curricular imbalances at BC, for making a space for the subaltern, and for broadening my
perspective in each and every class session.
When I reflect on my years at Boston College, it becomes apparent that AADS has, in many ways,
been the driving force behind my most significant undergraduate experiences. My AADS classes and
professors prompted me to travel to Tanzania in the summer after my sophomore year, to spend my junior
year studying African history and literature at the University of Oxford, to intern at the Museum of the
African Diaspora, and to write a senior thesis about the Civil Rights Movement.
The AADS Program at BC has helped me grow enormously as both a student and a human being.
I feel well equipped to enter “adulthood” as an informed, educated, and active citizen not because I have
spent the past four years at Boston College, but more specifically because I am graduating as an African
and African Diaspora Studies minor. AADS has profoundly altered the way I view the world, helping me
develop a keen eye for injustice, an awareness of intersectionality, a historicized perspective, and a deep
appreciation for the art and literature that lies outside of the hegemonic canon.
In our senior seminar with Professor Jean-Charles this semester, we’ve often discussed the concept
of “home” within the context of the African diaspora. Looking back as a senior, I realize that AADS has
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voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
become my home at Boston College. It is the locus around which my experiences have revolved, and
more than any other component of my BC experience, it has molded me into the person standing before
you. To the entire African and African Diaspora Studies Program, including the faculty members, staff,
and students, I offer my unending gratitude. Thank you for giving me a place to grow academically, for
irrevocably expanding and altering my perspective, and for making me more human.
Grace West, class of ’15, was a Presidential Scholar, graduated summa cum laude, and received numerous honors, including the McCarthy Prize
for best Scholars of the College honors thesis, and the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Brendan Connolly, SJ Award.
AVH Fellows Travel to Ghana and Haiti
By Richard Paul
Named in honor of the first director of the university’s Black Studies Program, the purpose of the
Amanda V. Houston Traveling Fellowship (AVH) is to prepare Boston College students for leadership
in the United States and the world by enriching their personal and educational development through
travel. Consistent with the namesake’s lifelong role as an educator, community leader, and mentor,
the fellowship underwrites travel and research opportunities for undergraduate students. Thanks to
the financial support of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Memorial Committee, as of 2011, AADS now awards two
traveling fellowships each year. Each fellowship provides
up to $3000 toward domestic or international travel,
including transportation, lodging, meals and researchrelated expenses. The successful recipients can use the
award for either an independent research project under
the supervision of a faculty member or a research paper
attached to an approved course in a BC-recognized study
abroad program. The 2015 AVH Selection Committee received many
impressive research proposals that addressed important
From left to right: Sophia Marseille, Tina Nadeene
Anilus, Executive Coordinator of REFKAD “Rezo Fanm
topics in the areas of public health, social justice, and
Kapab Dayiti”, Sandra Jean Jaques, Statistician for UNFPA racial identity. AVH applicants proposed to conduct
Haiti
research on colorectal cancer, explore race & ethnicity in
Dominican literature, and study the portrayal of race in French hip-hop. This year’s recipients are two
outstanding undergraduate students, Sophia Marseille and Sonia Chiamaka Okorie. Sophia Marseille
(Class of 2016), a political science major and AADS minor, traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to conduct
research for a project entitled, “The Effects of Political and Cultural Ideology on Reporting of Sexual
Violence against Women in Haitian Refugee Camps.” Sonia Chiamaka
Okorie (Class of 2017), a nursing student, traveled to Humjibre, Ghana,
where she pursued research on a project entitled, “Perceived Susceptibility
to Malaria: An Evaluation of Bed Net Usage of Ghanaian Mothers and
Children under Five.” Okorie will share her research at the International
Conference on Child Rights & Sight at Yale University in October. With the
generous support of the MLK Jr. Memorial Committee, AADS was able to
partially fund the travel of a third finalist, John Gabelus, a theology major
and AADS Minor, who is working on a comparative study of alternative
healing practices in Haitian communities in Boston and Montreal, Canada.
This is the twentieth year that AADS has awarded AVH fellowships
and we look forward to continuing to be able to support the research
endeavors of exceptional undergraduates. Our recipients continue to join
the ranks of BC scholars who have traveled the world and added to the body
Sonia Chiamaka Okorie
of knowledge that our university produces.
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voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
AADS Minors Finalist and Recipient of Oscar A. Romero Scholarship
By Anne Donnelly and Julia MacMahon
The African and African Diaspora Studies Program
is pleased to congratulate AADS minors Ricardo Alberto and
Giancarlo Sanchez for their recognition by the 2015 Archbishop
Oscar A. Romero Scholarship Committee. Among a field of
superbly qualified candidates, both students made it to the final
round of consideration, with Ricardo ultimately being awarded the
top honor.
The Romero Scholarship recognizes a Boston College
junior who has shown an exceptional dedication to academic
achievement, extracurricular leadership, and service to the
Hispanic/Latino community both on and off campus. Oscar
Romero, the man who inspired the award, was Archbishop of El
Salvador in the 1970s and was the personification of Christian
Giancarlo Sanchez and Ricardo Alberto
charity and love. He was known for preaching and working for
justice for all of the poor and oppressed of the country and continued to advocate passionately, despite
facing frequent threats from those opposed to his ideas. He was assassinated by a death squad while
celebrating the Eucharist in 1980.
Ricardo became interested in social
With everything at the forefront of
justice during his freshman year, with his
participation in the popular Jamaican Magis
the nation’s mind, now’s a great
trip, where he and other Boston College
time. I can make changes to the
students worked with school children, serving
as teaching assistants. The trip was the first real
system.
spark for him. “I saw God in the children I was
working with in Jamaica… our interactions were
inspiring to me,” he recalled. Giancarlo also started early, embarking on the Dominican Republic Learning
and Immersion Program in his first year. His group donated school supplies, clothes, and toiletries and
visited the school they sponsored. He said it was an eye opening experience for him and his peers: “I saw
many injustices in a lens that over there is very magnified… people don’t have equal access to water or
education just because they’re a shade darker or because they come from a lower economic background.”
During their sophomore year, both Giancarlo and Ricardo continued their community service and
joined the Mississippi Delta trip, a program similar to Jamaican Magis, where they assisted teachers in
struggling schools. Their engagement in community service also began to manifest itself more locally.
Giancarlo got involved in the Dominican Students Association (DSA), often collaborating with the Haitian
Students Association (HSA) on campus to foster discussion around the issues he was exposed to on his
service trip. Ricardo joined the PULSE program, volunteering twelve hours a week for Jumpstart, an
early education program for low-income students. In the fall of his junior year, Ricardo studied abroad,
spending the semester in Buenos Aires, where he continued to become more aware of social injustices.
He learned about the shantytowns existing on the fringes of the city, where the marginalized and
impoverished of Buenos Aires lived. Giancarlo took a leadership position in the DSA, working with the
HSA to bring in speakers. He also did an internship with DREAM, a non-profit organization that teaches
high school students how to be financially literate.
Both Ricardo and Giancarlo feel that the AADS minor informed their intellectual growth and
commitment to social justice. Ricardo cited Juan Concepcion’s class, “Studies in Race, Law, and
Resistance,” as the major reason he decided to pursue the minor. Giancarlo loved his class with Professor
Jean-Charles, which explored Dominican and Haitian culture and relations through literature. Giancarlo
reflected on his AADS classes, saying, “They gave me insight. They helped me learn about these social
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voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
movements and how people fought for and advocated for social justice. They helped me form my own
way of providing rights for others.” For both men, the minor shed new light on their global and local
community service.
The AADS minor will figure prominently in both Ricardo and Giancarlo’s post-graduation lives.
Giancarlo is interested in public finance, law or economic development. He also hopes to be a voice for
those who have been consistently marginalized by current and past institutions and policies. Ricardo
plans to pursue public sector law, specializing in social justice and civil rights. He emphasized the current
relevance of such a career: “With everything at the forefront of the nation’s mind, now’s a great time. I can
make changes to the system.”
Message from the Director, continued from Page 1
And finally, a new beginning of sorts, is the promotion of Professor Régine Jean-Charles to
associate professor with tenure. As anyone who has taken a class with her can attest, Professor JeanCharles’s rigorous and nurturing approach in the classroom is one of the things that makes AADS such an
awesome program to be associated with. The administration’s recognition of the quality of her scholarship,
the excellence of her teaching, and the ardor of her service is one of the best things that has occurred in the
program this past year.
But 2014–2015 was a challenging year as well. There have been events that bear directly on
communities of people of African descent that have unfolded beyond our campus and which have surely
made us all recognize our own privilege, place what we are doing here at Boston College within a larger
perspective, and think about how what we learn and teach in the classroom might contribute to the larger
struggle against racial, economic, gender, sexual, and political injustice more broadly. The beginning of
the school year was dominated by media coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. We were not
only confronted with the horrific scenes of illness and death in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. We
were also reminded of the structural inequality that exists in the global South, the ways in which the
ineffective Western response to the outbreak was an artifact of European imperialism, and the ease with
which Americans are ready to racialize and dehumanize the victims of disease, those who are in most need
of compassionate care. The Ebola crisis was soon eclipsed by the non-indictments of the police officers
involved in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the popular mobilizations that resulted—on
this campus and around the nation. In a year during which we should have been celebrating the fiftieth
anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we were consistently
confronted with the persistence of institutionalized racism—in the deaths of Tamir Rice, Natasha
McKenna, Freddie Gray, and countless others at the hands of the state—and white nationalist terrorism—
in the massacre at Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the apparent growth
in the popularity and reach of white supremacist organizations. As I write this in July 2015, other parts
of the diaspora are in crisis—from the rise of Islamist extremism in Nigeria to the racist- and nativistmotivated imminent deportations of people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic.
Engaging Boston College students around these issues in our courses and in our programming
is the raison d’etre of AADS. Through a variety of courses this upcoming year—“Reading Race at the
Millennium” (Vats); “Haiti and the Dominican Republic” (Jean-Charles); “Understanding the Social
Context of Violence” (C. Shawn McGuffey); “History of Medicine and Public Health in the African
Diaspora” (Summers); “Genres of Black Women’s Writing” (Frederick); “New Orleans: Justice in the
City” (Copeland)—AADS faculty will continue to encourage students to critically reflect upon some of the
knotty social, political, and cultural problems and remarkable resiliencies that have shaped the formation
and evolution of the African diaspora. In our New Directions in African Diaspora Studies Lecture series—
the theme of which is “Geographies of the African Diaspora”—we will also strive to activate students’
intellectual thirst, imagination, and sense of ethical engagement. On behalf of the entire AADS faculty
and office, I invite you to help us make 2015–2016 a positive and enriching year for our program, our
university, and the African diasporic communities that extend beyond our campus.
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voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
voices of the diaspora | fall 2015
After Sixteen Year Hiatus, continued from Page 1
2015-2016 New Directions in African Diaspora Studies Lecture Series
The success of “Blacks in Metropolitan Boston” led to several follow-up conferences—“The History
of Blacks in Boston” (1984), “Black History is a Family Affair” (1985), “The Struggle for Equal Education”
(1987), “Law and Politics” (1989), and “The Caribbean Heritage” (1996). The last Blacks in Boston conference was held in 2000. In collaboration with the Irish Studies Program, the Black Studies Program, under
the direction of Professor Frank Taylor and Sandra Sandiford, organized “Black and Green: Encounters
Between African Americans and Irish Americans in Boston.”
In 2014, Professor Rhonda Frederick, director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program, decided to revive the conference. In the midst of the raging debates over immigration, Frederick
wanted the conference to explore “what black immigrants and immigration bring to this conversation.”
The conference theme, “Black . . . and Immigrant,” is aimed at soliciting presentations on African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino immigrant communities in Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and New
England as a whole. The theme not only reflects the contemporary import of this issue, but also provides
an opportunity to reflect on the fifty years that have transpired since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Some of the subthemes that will be explored include: definitions
The Blacks in Boston conference
of “black” in sending and receiving countries;
citizenship and belonging for black Americans;
‘will once again assert the vital
and immigration as a black civil rights issue.
connection between intellectual
Similar to its predecessors, “Black . . .
and activist organizing across
and Immigrant” will host both academics and
local activists and social service providers who
disciplines.’
work with immigrant communities in the Boston area. According to Frederick, the conference
“will once again assert the vital connection between intellectual and activist organizing across disciplines.”
The keynote speaker for this year’s conference is Violet Showers Johnson, an alumna of Boston
College’s History PhD program, and professor of history and director of Africana Studies at Texas A&M
University. Professor Showers Johnson is the recent author of African & American: West Africans in
Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, 2014). The conference will be preceded by a New Directions in African Diaspora Studies lecture by Regine Jackson, associate professor of sociology at Agnes Scott College,
and author of Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (Routledge, 2011).
This year’s New Directions lecture series’ theme is “Geographies of the African Diaspora.” We will
be joined by five dynamic scholars whose work engages questions of space, place, and community in the
African diaspora. The inaugural lecture by Professor Lynnell Thomas, chair of American Studies at the
University of Massachusetts at Boston, will reflect on the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the
devastation it wrought on a place that is so closely associated with the heterogeneity and vitality of African
diasporic culture.
Professor Jackson’s lecture will be Friday, April 1st, at 4:30 in Devlin 101. “Black . . . and Immigrant” will take place
from 8:30-5:00 on Saturday, April 2nd, in Gasson 100. For more information, visit: www.bc.edu/centers/ila/events/blacksin-boston
◊◊ M. Shawn Copeland’s article “Revisiting Racism,” published in America: The National Catholic Review, received the
first place Catholic Press Award in the category of Best Essay Originating with a Magazine or Newsletter.
◊◊ Rhonda Frederick published an article, “Making Jamaican Love: Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain and Romance-ified
Diaspora Identities,” in Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.
◊◊ Régine Jean-Charles’s book, Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary, was published by Ohio State University Press.
◊◊ C. Shawn McGuffey participated in a high-profile conference in Tanzania devoted to policy discussions around the
International Criminal Court’s role in protecting human rights in Africa.
◊◊ Martin Summers’s coedited book, Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, was
published by the University of Minnesota Press.
◊◊ Anjali Vats published an article, “Cooking Up Hashtag Activism: #PaulasBestDishes and Counternarratives of Southern Food,” in Commmunication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
◊◊ Cynthia Young coedited a forum, “Whiteness Redux or Redefined?,” in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of
American Studies.
◊◊ Amber Murrey-Ndewa, the 2014–2015 AADS Dissertation Fellow, successfully defended her dissertation, “Lifescapes
of a Pipedream: A Mixed Tape on Structural Violence, Resistance, and Struggle in Two Villages along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline,” in the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford.
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Congratulations Class of 2015!
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Thursday, September 24th, 7-8:30
Professor Lynnell Thomas, Department of American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Boston
“Race, Place, and Tourist Space: New Orleans Ten Years after Katrina”
Devlin 101
Wednesday, October 14th , 4:30-6:00
Professor Myriam J. A. Chancy, Department of Africana Studies, Scripps College
“Dis(Af)Filiation: Spectatorship and Cultural Transmission Across the African Diaspora”
McGuinn 121
Thursday, November 12th, 4:30-6:00
Olive Senior, Writer
“‘Like Soldiers Going to War’: The West Indian Builders of the Panama Canal”
McGuinn 121
Thursday, February 25th, 4:30-6:00
Professor Joshua Guild, Department of History, Princeton University
“‘This Could Be You:’ Confronting the Specter of Racial Violence in Postwar New York and London”
Devlin 101
Friday, April 1st, 4:30-6:00
Professor Regine Jackson, Department of Sociology, Agnes Scott College
“Boston Haitians: Between Symbolic Inclusion and Enduring Inequalities”
Devlin 101
For more information, visit http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/aads/events/newdirections.html
faculty news
page 7
African and African Diaspora Studies
301 Lyons Hall
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Dr. Martin Summers, Director
Phone: (617) 552-3814
Email: martin.summers@bc.edu
Richard Paul, Assistant Director
Phone: (617) 552-3238
Email: richard.paul@bc.edu
/AfricanAfricanDiasporaStudiesProgram
@AADSatBC
www.bc.edu/aads