This essay brings Black Studies, now commonly referred to as Africana Studies, further into the public humanities dialogue. Scholars in the public humanities field are urging a practice of humanities that is collaborative and committed to racial and social justice, especially in the context of community-based scholarship. The origin and current protocols of Black Studies are also community-centric and operate within a liberatory framework in that it is ultimately concerned with the vitality of Black people across the diaspora. The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions. In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American at African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.

Drawing on interviews and archival and published materials, Gyamfi reinterprets Anani Dzidzienyo’s significance as a Black Studies scholar and activist. Dzidzienyo was a pioneer in academic African diaspora studies who institutionalized the inclusion of Africa and Brazil. For fifty years, Dzidzienyo created Black Studies and Afro-Latin American programs, designed Afro-Brazilian courses that expanded Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and supported freedom struggles in Africa and Brazil. In so doing, he built a transnational network of scholar-activists and institutions. Yet, for all this, scholars have mostly neglected Dzidzienyo’s work and wide influence on multiple fields of study and liberation movements.

If, as Eric J. Cassell suggests in The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, “Suffering occurs when an impending destruction of the person is perceived; [and] continues until the threat of disintegration has passed or until the integrity of the person can be restored in some manner,” and that suffering is due to both emotional and physical conditions, then there has been much suffering concentrated into the year that was 2020.1 All definitions of suffering have to find a way of aligning two central vectors: the Self as category has to be defined in all its variegated possibilities and contradictory levels and then correlated to the category of World. But often Self and World are not easily separable even for heuristic purposes given the boundaries of one overlap with the other and the two are often completely co-constitutive. Although the Self may disintegrate in direct response to reversals of fortune, it may also, properly speaking, suffer an experience of painful biographical discontinuity simply at losing the capacity to produce a coherent account of the world to itself and to others.2 This sense of incoherence is central to the conditions that were experienced under colonialism and its aftermath in many parts of the world, where the instruments for making meaning both communally and individually were often seen to have been compromised by the impositions of colonial history.

Drawing on never-before-utilized archival and oral sources, “Making Peasants Chèf” contends that decades of peasant marginalization from political power created the social and political conditions for the rise of the infamous tonton makout militia under the dictator François Duvalier. After coming to power in 1957, Duvalier militarized and rearmed peasants in exchange for their loyalty. Thousands of previously ostracized peasants enlisted in the dreaded makout militia to access status and political power. This explains why the peasant-based militia formed an arm of state repression. With the support of an armed peasantry, Duvalier successfully repressed the political opposition, allowing the regime to stay in power for almost three decades.

Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.