Abstract Inspired by the ideas of US Black feminist scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper, I have been writing a book about the special spark that we have as diaspora Africans to ignite revolution and enact radical social change. Cooper draws from the Haitian Revolution to express how this fire inside everyday people, specifically the rebellious spirit that existed among enslaved people, took shape because of in-depth knowledge of and experience with violent racial, gender, and class oppression. For the last two decades, as a scholar in African Diaspora Studies, I have been teaching the long history of violence, and more importantly, the myriad ways that people have fought back.
This presentation brings to light this fire at the heart of the field of African Diaspora Studies and the social justice imperative in our research and teaching. I discuss the “Austin School Manifesto: An Approach to the Black or African Diaspora,” a collaborative document produced by scholars at the University of Texas at Austin, where I received my graduate training in a diasporic philosophy with the explicit aim of decolonizing episteme and inciting political praxis. My book reflects my deep commitment to answering bell hooks’s challenge that acquiring knowledge and teaching must be understood a “practice of freedom” that encourages critical thinking in university and social movement classrooms and encourages students to build more just societies. Political attempts to dismantle Ethnic Studies programs that include African Diaspora Studies and the targeted dismantling of social justice organizations illustrate the power of these classrooms and insurgent knowledges. I am also inspired by historian and civil rights activist Vincent Harding (1974), who long asked the question, “What is the vocation of the Black scholar?” In this presentation and the book, I ask myself and my colleagues, if liberation is not the ultimate aim of African Diaspora Studies, then to what end are we striving?
Bio Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Africana Studies Graduate Chair, and the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Perry comes to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.
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