Africana studies is a tradition of intellectual inquiry and study of African peoples. Using a transdisciplinarian approach, Africana scholars document the global migrations and reconstruction of African peoples, as well as patterns of linkages to the African continent (and among the peoples of the African Diaspora). Having perhaps the most international faculty on the Cornell campus, all professors represent the three regions of the African Diaspora: Africa, African America, and African Caribbean - the three foci of Africana Studies. In addition to the faculty, the Africana Studies and Research Center is comprised of nationally and internationally-recognized scholars and educators; socially-conscious intellectuals; and students representing each of Cornell's undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges.
Department websiteOlúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Professor
Publications
"Looking Back, Facing Forward: (Re)-Imagining a Global Africa," The Black Scholar vol. 45, no. 1 (2015), 50-68
Africa Must Be Modern: a Manifesto, North American Edition with a new Preface (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014)
"What is 'African Studies'?: African Scholars, Africanists, and the Production of Knowledge," in Kofi Anyidoho and Helen Lauer, eds., Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities Through African Perspectives, 2 Vols. (Accra: Sub-Saharan Press, 2012)
"Post-Independence African Political Philosophy," in Kwasi Wiredu, ed., Companion to African Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
"Political Obligation and Military Rule," The Philosophical Forum vol. XXVII, No. 2 (Winter 1996), 161-193
Departments and programs
Links
Samantha Noelle Sheppard
Associate Professor
Education
BA (2007), Dartmouth College
MA (2009), University of California Los Angeles
PhD (2014), University of California Los Angeles
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- American Studies Program
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- Performing and Media Arts
Links
Keywords
feminist, gender, and sexuality studies
Russell Rickford
Associate Professor
Publications
“‘These People are No Charles Mansons or Spaced-out Moonies’: Jonestown and African-American Expatriation in the 1970s,” in Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History, Brandon Byrd, Leslie Alexander, and Russell Rickford, eds. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022).
“1944-1949,” in Four Hundred Souls, eds. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (New York: One World, 2021), 312-316.
“‘To Build a New World’: African American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity,“ Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 52-68.
“Black Power as Educational Renaissance: The Harlem Landscape,” in Educating Harlem: Schools and the Referendum on the American Dream, ed. Ansley Erickson (Columbia University Press, 2019), 210-233.
“African-American Expats, Guyana, and the Pan-African Ideal in the 1970s,” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley Farmer, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 233-252.
“Power to the People: Attica and Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2017): 96-99.
“‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the late 1960s and 1970s.” Journal of American History. 103. 2017
We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016
“Black Power and Education for Liberation.” in Black Power 50. Ed. Diouf, Sylviane and Komozi Woodard. New York: New Press. 51-69. 2016
“‘Kazi is the Blackest of All’: Pan African Nationalism and the Making of the ‘New Man’, 1969-1975.” Journal of African American History. 101:97-125. 2016
Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle. New Labor Forum. Winter, 2015.
“‘Socialism From Below’: A Black Scholar's Marxist Genealogy.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. 13:371-392. 2011
Russell Rickford, ed., Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011).
“Integration, Black Nationalism and Radical Democratic Transformation in African-American Philosophies of Education, 1966-74.” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Transformation. Ed. Hinton, Elizabeth Kai and Manning Marable. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 287-317. 2011
Betty Shabazz: A Life Before and After Malcolm X. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks. 2003.
John Rickford and Russell Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2000.
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University, History
M.Phil., Columbia University, History
M.A., Columbia University, African American Studies
B.A., Howard University, Journalism
Departments and programs
Riché Richardson
Professor
Publications
Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body (Duke University Press 2021)
“From the 'Summer of Faulkner' to Oprah's Obama: What We Can Learn from Joe Christmas and Miss Jane Pittman." “The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and 21st Century America.” Ed. Jaime Harker, Jay Watson, and Cecilia Konchar Farr. The Mississippi Quarterly 3(2013): 459-486.
“Oprah’s Faulkner.” Ed. Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner and Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 120-145.
"'The Bed Intruder' - News Video Goes Viral: Antoine Dodson as Internet Celebrity and Commodity." “On Gender and Sexuality.” Ed. Amber Johnson. Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society 4(2014) (online)
“Monumentalizing Mary McLeod Bethune and Rosa Parks in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” “The Genius of Black Women: One Hundred Years of Triumph.” Ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Paula Giddings. Phillis: The Journal for Research on African American Women 2:1 (2014): 23-30.
“Framing Rosa Parks in Reel Time.” Southern Quarterly 4(2013): 54-65.
“Push, Precious and New Narratives of Slavery and Harlem.” Black Camera 4(2012): 161-180.
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- American Studies Program
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- Literatures in English
Links
- Youtube Channel
- Richardson CV
- Academic Website
- Artist website
- Black Masculinity and the U.S. South
- New Southern Studies
- Emancipation's Daughters
- Riché Richardson's Instagram
- Blogger Art Quilts
- Scholar as Human Page
- GUEST ROOM: Kneeling In Prayer and Protest
- Textile artist Riché Richardson explores the African American experience
Keywords
feminist, gender, and sexuality studies
Steven Pond
Associate Professor
Publications
Selected publications:
- Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010 [2005]); winner, Woody Guthrie Award for Best Monograph in Popular Music (IASP–US).
- “Old Wine, New Bottles: Record Collecting, Jazz Reissues, and the Jazz Tradition,” Jazz Perspectives Vol. 13 No. 1 (2021).
- “The ‘Funky Drummer’ Break: Ghost Notes, Timbre, and Popular Music Drumming,” in Russell Hartenberger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Percussion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 201-210.
- “A Negotiated Tradition: Learning ‘Traditional’ Ewe Drumming,” Black Music Research Journal (special issue on the “culture industry”) Vol. 34 No. 2 (2014): 169-200.
- “‘Chameleon’ Meets Soul Train: Herbie, James, Michael, Damita Jo, and Jazz-Funk,” American Music (special funk issue) Vol. 52 No. 4 (2013): 125-140.
- “Jamming the Reception: Ken Burns, Jazz and the Problem of ‘America’s Music.’” Notes: Journal of the Modern Language Association, vol. 60, no. 1 (September 2003): 11-45.
Education
- Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Departments and programs
Keywords
African-American musics, jazz
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Professor
Departments and programs
Links
Viranjini P Munasinghe
Associate Professor
Publications
Academic Articles
2007 Dougla logics and nation building in Trinidad. South Asian Review. Special issue on “Empire and Racial Hybridity”. Edited by Deepika Bhari. 27(1):182-204.
2006 Claims to purity in theory and culture: Pitfalls and promises. American Ethnologist 33(4): 588-592.
2006 Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization. American Ethnologist 33(4): 549-562.
2005 Narrating a Nation through Mixed Bloods. Social Analysis 49(2): 155-163.
2002 Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity. American Ethnologist 29(3): 663-692.
2001 Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle in Trinidad. Journal of Asian American Studies 4(1):1-34.
1997 Culture Creators and Culture Bearers: The Interface Between Race and Ethnicity in Trinidad. Transforming Anthropology 6(1):72-86.
Books
2001 Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (CUP).
Chapters
2009 Foretelling Ethnicity in Trinidad: The Post Emancipation Labor Problem. In Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology. Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford, eds. Pp 139-186. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2008 Rescuing Theory from the Nation. In Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely, eds. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- American Studies Program
- Anthropology
- Asian American Studies Program
- Institute for Comparative Modernities
Links
Stacey A. Langwick
Associate Professor
Publications
Books
Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing. Co-edited with Hansjoerg Dilger and Abdoulaye Kane Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2012
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2011
Journal Articles
in press. “Properties of (Dis)Possession: Therapeutic Plants, Intellectual Property, and Questions of Justice in Tanzania,” Special issue on Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law edited by Helen Tilley, Osiris, expected 2021.
2018. “A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World.” Cultural Anthropology 33(3): 415-443.
2017. Liwa, A., R. Roediger, H. Jaka, A. Bougaila, L. Smart, S. Langwick and R. Peck. “Herbal and Alternative Medicine Use in Tanzanian Adults Admitted with Hypertension-related Diseases: A Mixed-methods Study,” International Journal of Hypertension 3:1-9.
2015. “Partial Publics: The Political Promise of Traditional Medicine in Africa.” Current Anthropology 63(4) August, with commentaries by by Rajshree Chandra, Rosemary Coombe, Ruth Prince, Noelle Sullivan, and Claire Wendland.
2012. "Agitating for Hope, Learning to Care." Comments on Clare Wendland's article, "Animating Biomedicine's Moral Order: The Crisis of Practice in Malawian Medical Training," Current Anthropology.
2010. From Non-Aligned Medicines to Market-based herbals: China's relationship to the Shifting Politics of Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. Medical Anthropology.
2008. Articulate(d) Bodies: Traditional Medicine in a Tanzanian Hospital. American Ethnologist.
2007. Devils, Parasites and Fierce Needles: Healing and the Politics of Translation in Southeastern Tanzania. Science, Technology, and Human Values.
Book Chapters
forthcoming. “The Garden: New Objects of Medicine in the More-than-Human Anthropocene,” in Anna Harris and John Notts (eds) Between Blackboards and Formaldehyde: The Matters of Medical Knowledge. Intellect.
2018. “Healing in the Anthropocene.” In Keiichi Omura, Atsuro Morita, Shiho Satsuka and Grant Jun Otsuki (eds.) The World Multiple: Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds. Routledge.
2017. “The Value of Secrets: Pragmatic Healers and Proprietary Knowledge.” In William Olsen and Carolyn Sargent (eds.) African Medical Pluralism. Indiana University Press. Pp. 31-49.
2012. “The Choreography of Global Subjection: The Traditional Birth Attendant in Contemporary Configurations of World Health.” In Dilger, Kane, and Langwick (eds.) Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing. Indiana University Press.
2012. “Introduction,” Transnational Medicine, Mobile Experts: Globalization, Health and Power In & Beyond Africa (co-written with Hansjoerg Dilger and Abdoulaye Kane). In Dilger, Kane, and Langwick (eds.) Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing. Indiana University Press.
2011 hardcover/2017 paperback. “Healers and Scientists: The Epistemological Politics of Research about Medicinal Plants in Tanzania, or “Moving Away from Traditional Medicine.”” In Geissler and Molyneux (eds.) Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa. Berghahn Books. Pp. 263-295.
2006. “Geographies of Medicine: Interrogating the Boundary between ‘Traditional’ and ‘Modern’ Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika.” In Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West (eds.) Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Indiana University Press. Pp. 143-165.
Photo Essay
2018. “Cultivating Vitality: A Photo Essay,” Anthropology News website, 24 January.
News and Events
"Stacey Langwick receives fellowship for work on toxicity and healing" https://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/news/stacey-langwick-receives-fellowship-work-toxicity-and-healing
Food and Healing Justice workshop I, Ecological Learning Collaboratory http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/06/collaboratory-shares-ideas-food-healing-justice
"Anthropologist explores toxicity and healing in East Africa" http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/05/anthropologist-explores-toxicity-and-healing-east-africa
Planting Futures Garden, Qualities of Life working group http://news.cornell.edu/essentials/2016/12/campus-pauses-reflect-future
"Langwick Awarded Institute for Social Sciences Grant" http://anthropology.cornell.edu/langwick-awarded-institute-social-sciences-grant
"Langwick wins grant to study African Law" http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/01/langwick-wins-grant-study-african-law-medicine
Education
PhD Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Masters of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Bachelor of Arts, Agnes Scott College.
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- Anthropology
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- Science and Technology Studies
Links
- Qualities of Life working group
- Translating Vitalities: A Collective
- Science and Technology) Research Network
- Global Health Program
- academia.edu page with publications & CV
Keywords
Anthropology of medicine, healing and the body. Ethnography of care and chronicity. Postcolonial science studies. Toxicity. Intellectual property. Anthropology of knowledge/materiality. Ontological Politics. Crtical Plant Studies. African ethnography. Tanzania. Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Saida Hodžić
Associate Professor
Publications
Book
The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. University of California Press, 2017.
See book forum with contributions by Inderpal Grewal, Stacy Pigg, Bettina Shell-Duncan, Claire Wendland, and Ara Wilson, and my own response, Feminist Anthropology as a Fugitive Practice.
On Critique of Humanitarianism and Anthropological Epistemic Violence:
Refugees Write Back p. 157 ff.
Of War, Culture, and Responsibility. Anthropology News. May 2007.
Book Review, Global Health in Times of Violence, Paul Farmer et al., Eds. Journal of Global Public Health 6(3): 678-680.
On Critique of Food Scarcity, Neoliberal Violence, and Crisis Discourses
The Ends of Cutting in Ghana: Blood Loss, Scarcity, and Slow Harm after NGOs. American Ethnologist 43(4): 636-649, 2016.
On Ghanaian Women’s Rights Advocacy, NGOs, and Gender Violence
Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence, Gender Politics, and Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana. Ethnos 74(3): 331-360, 2009.
Seduced by Information, Contaminated by Power: Women’s Rights as a Global Panopticon. Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women’s Rights, Human Lives. Debra Bergoffen et al., eds. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2011.
The Logics of Controversy: Gender Violence as a Site of Frictions in Ghanaian Advocacy. Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Richard Roberts et al., eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.
Feminist Bastards: Toward a Posthumanist Critique of NGOization. Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism.Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds. Duke University Press. 2014.
On Medical Knowledge, Biopolitics, Global Health and Global Governance
Ascertaining Deadly Harms: Aesthetics and Politics of Global Evidence. Cultural Anthropology. 28(1): 86–109, 2013. Full text. Article website with classroom questions and author interview.
Podcast interview on global health governance.
Global Governance. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell. 2018.
Education
- PhD, Medical Anthropology, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley
- Desingated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, UC Berkeley
- MA, Sociocultural Anthropology, Cologne University
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- Anthropology
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program
Links
Keywords
medical anthropology, feminism, violence; Ghana, Africa