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Africa and the Diversity Turn

The killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 led to social protests against anti-Black violence that reverberated around the world, including in academia. Since then, various universities have released statements affirming their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of these institutions in the United States have accompanied solidarity statements with actionable projects, including hiring faculty of color, establishing centers and institutes devoted to Blackness and race, and initiating curricular reforms aimed at a decolonized pedagogy. Institutions continue to rename buildings that until recently honored slaveholders. And the English department at Cornell was renamed the Department of Literatures in English to affirm the heterogeneity of the literary traditions housed in the unit, including the literatures and cultures of Africa. Grantmaking is not left out in the transformative quest for racial justice. The Mellon Foundation, for instance, in January 2021 awarded 72 million dollars to fifteen universities for humanities projects targeting racial justice under its Just Future grants. These efforts to grapple with a problematic past and complicated present are important, but it is crucial that the renewed commitment to Blackness does not ignore the African continent. In other words, the overdue serious attention to the historical experiences and knowledges produced by people of African descent must contend with the complex facts of Blackness that stretch from the continent to the multivalent Black diasporas. What does this mean for African Studies? There is an opportunity to expand curricular offerings on Africa in order to arrest the unwarranted ignorance of the continent in Euro-America. A recent survey on the teaching of African literature, for example, indicated the overrepresentation of a few African countries and select authors in the syllabi submitted for the study (https://africasacountry.com/2020/08/african-liter ature-is-a-country). It is heartening that American students are exposed to African texts, but don’t we risk reifying monolithic or distorted views of the continent if its heterogeneity is not adequately represented in the classroom