The contradictory musings of a 'new' Black Studies

Africa World Now Project

Image: Monument to the Maroon, Alberto Lescay, in El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba, taken June 2019; https://albertolescay.com/

It must be said, we have entered the most aggressive phase of European modernity’s disintegration. One that has been built upon decades of exploitation—human and natural. This may seem to be a very strong statement. Some may even suggest that it is an overstatement. It is neither. It is not based on speculation or opinion. The map of human history, the warnings of anti-racist, anti-racial capitalist, environmentalists, antiwar thinkers, advocates, activists have predicted this moment. Octavia Butler, Martin Delany, Ngugi, write and wrote about this. Fanon, Cabral, Biko, Armah, Gyekye, Du Bois, the Boggs, the Jacksons, Baraka theorized this moment. Coltrane, Coleman attempted to play us toward another direction. Simone, Lincoln, Holiday, provided a way to understand and see beyond this moment.

It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we utilize this space, this moment of fracturing to create something new. We have been given the tools; our ancestors gave us the map. Let us read it together. To reformulate a black studies within the epistemic and philosophical architecture that is inadequate to properly engage its trajectory and call it new, is a contradiction of the highest order.
Today, we will explore the contradictory musings of this new black studies...with Dr. Corey Walker.

Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press), editor of Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy: Can We Make American Democracy Work? (Edward Elgar Publishing), editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures,” and associate editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, book chapters and reviews appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals and co-directed and co-produced the documentary film fifeville with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. He has held faculty and academic leadership positions at Brown University, University of Virginia, Virginia Union University, and Winston-Salem State University and visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and University of Richmond.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!