The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, presents this seminar as part of From Area Studies to Global Studies, a course within the Ph.D. in Global Studies curriculum. This series will feature four sessions during the semester, bringing together distinguished scholars specializing in the studies of Africa, Asia, and their diasporas, and whose work engages with the most pressing questions in Global Studies.
The first session, Locating Africa on the “World” Scene: Images, Inventions and Meanings, will be presented by Professor Mamadou Diouf, Visiting Professor of African History at The Africa Institute, GSU; Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University, and moderated by Amy Niang, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Africa Institute, GSU.
Join us on Thursday, September 25, 2025, from 12:30 to 2:30 PM at The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
The colonization of Africa by European powers was both sustained and fed by the invention of a racial hierarchy and by a set of operations through which African communities were dispossessed of their cultures and cast out. In response to this expropriation and banishment, African women and men have generated counternarratives (literary, visual, performative…) to the Western “civilizing mission.”
They have reactivated oral historical accounts and recuperated material cultures long discarded, thereby articulating both the common threads among and the diversity within African/Black societies. These African and Black narratives of Africa sought to carve out a space of their own in the redefined territory of world history. They contested Europe’s exclusive claim over temporality. For Africa and the Black diaspora, regaining control over the writing of Africa’s history and of African/Black humanities has meant insisting on cultural, creative, and historiographical parity and affirming the multiplicity of the narratives of universals and modernities.
To study and account for the histories of Africa and peoples of African descent necessarily entails revising world history. Africa’s entry into the world’s time begins with the first phase of globalization in the fifteenth century. Writing Africa into the world’s temporality requires changing Europe’s interpretations of its own and others’ cultures. By studying African cultures and the events that marked Africa’s contacts with the Mediterranean, the Islamic world, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic worlds, African/Black intellectuals and artists have offered their interpretations of human cultures and historical movements writ large. This genealogy requires a thorough revision of history—as narrative, pedagogy, discipline, and institution—in order to right wrongs and correct flagrant misrepresentations.
Professor Mamadou’s presentation explores how African/Black intellectuals and artists have tracked the maneuvers that excluded Africa from civilization (processes of expropriation and dispossession; the making and unmaking of African libraries/archives) and the counter-figures engendered by the retrieval of lost, distorted, and submerged histories of non-Western peoples—“those peoples without history” that Western narratives have failed to account for. Their ambition is to recapture their histories for a more inclusive past and to reconfigure the various figurations of universalism; to dislodge African/Black narrative from the Western meta-discourse and to disjoin the binary pairing of Western Enlightenment and African/Black obscurity. Under what conditions, circumstances, and languages have Black/African intellectuals and artists developed what Toni Morrison called “an African commentary”—one that gives a voice to African/Black communities, recovers the agency of African/Black subjects, and, at the same time, redefines the contexts, forms, modes, institutions, and languages of knowledge production? They carry out this work not simply to document history; they actively appropriated and subverted narratives that had served imperial interests, marginalized and silenced the histories of colonized peoples, to decouple universalism and modernity from Western culture and Christianity.
Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies, a former Director of the Institute for African Studies, and a Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University. He is currently a Visiting Professor of African History at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. In addition to his academic roles, he serves on the Advisory Board of The Africa Institute. Read more.
Amy Niang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Africa Institute. Her research has been published in journals including International Relations, Alternatives, Politics, African Studies, African Economic History, Journal of Ritual Studies, and in numerous edited collections. She currently serves as a Special Issue Editor for Pluriversal International Relations. Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, presents this seminar as part of From Area Studies to Global Studies, a course within the Ph.D. in Global Studies curriculum. This series will feature four sessions during the semester, bringing together distinguished scholars specializing in the studies of Africa, Asia, and their diasporas, and whose work engages with the most pressing questions in Global Studies.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, presents this seminar as part of From Area Studies to Global Studies, a course within the Ph.D. in Global Studies curriculum. This series will feature four sessions during the semester, bringing together distinguished scholars specializing in the studies of Africa, Asia, and their diasporas, and whose work engages with the most pressing questions in Global Studies.
The first session, Locating Africa on the “World” Scene: Images, Inventions and Meanings, will be presented by Professor Mamadou Diouf, Visiting Professor of African History at The Africa Institute, GSU; Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University, and moderated by Amy Niang, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Africa Institute, GSU.
Join us on Thursday, September 25, 2025, from 12:30 to 2:30 PM at The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
The colonization of Africa by European powers was both sustained and fed by the invention of a racial hierarchy and by a set of operations through which African communities were dispossessed of their cultures and cast out. In response to this expropriation and banishment, African women and men have generated counternarratives (literary, visual, performative…) to the Western “civilizing mission.”
They have reactivated oral historical accounts and recuperated material cultures long discarded, thereby articulating both the common threads among and the diversity within African/Black societies. These African and Black narratives of Africa sought to carve out a space of their own in the redefined territory of world history. They contested Europe’s exclusive claim over temporality. For Africa and the Black diaspora, regaining control over the writing of Africa’s history and of African/Black humanities has meant insisting on cultural, creative, and historiographical parity and affirming the multiplicity of the narratives of universals and modernities.
To study and account for the histories of Africa and peoples of African descent necessarily entails revising world history. Africa’s entry into the world’s time begins with the first phase of globalization in the fifteenth century. Writing Africa into the world’s temporality requires changing Europe’s interpretations of its own and others’ cultures. By studying African cultures and the events that marked Africa’s contacts with the Mediterranean, the Islamic world, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic worlds, African/Black intellectuals and artists have offered their interpretations of human cultures and historical movements writ large. This genealogy requires a thorough revision of history—as narrative, pedagogy, discipline, and institution—in order to right wrongs and correct flagrant misrepresentations.
Professor Mamadou’s presentation explores how African/Black intellectuals and artists have tracked the maneuvers that excluded Africa from civilization (processes of expropriation and dispossession; the making and unmaking of African libraries/archives) and the counter-figures engendered by the retrieval of lost, distorted, and submerged histories of non-Western peoples—“those peoples without history” that Western narratives have failed to account for. Their ambition is to recapture their histories for a more inclusive past and to reconfigure the various figurations of universalism; to dislodge African/Black narrative from the Western meta-discourse and to disjoin the binary pairing of Western Enlightenment and African/Black obscurity. Under what conditions, circumstances, and languages have Black/African intellectuals and artists developed what Toni Morrison called “an African commentary”—one that gives a voice to African/Black communities, recovers the agency of African/Black subjects, and, at the same time, redefines the contexts, forms, modes, institutions, and languages of knowledge production? They carry out this work not simply to document history; they actively appropriated and subverted narratives that had served imperial interests, marginalized and silenced the histories of colonized peoples, to decouple universalism and modernity from Western culture and Christianity.
Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies, a former Director of the Institute for African Studies, and a Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University. He is currently a Visiting Professor of African History at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. In addition to his academic roles, he serves on the Advisory Board of The Africa Institute. Read more.
Amy Niang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Africa Institute. Her research has been published in journals including International Relations, Alternatives, Politics, African Studies, African Economic History, Journal of Ritual Studies, and in numerous edited collections. She currently serves as a Special Issue Editor for Pluriversal International Relations. Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
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