Africana Studies Minor

Director:  Roberta Meek, Lecturer, Media and Communication and History
 

The Africana Studies minor is an interdisciplinary study of the history, culture, and socio-economic experience of people of African descent living on the African continent and in Black Atlantic societies, including the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Africana Studies is a scholarly field, which interrogates the role of race and particularly blackness in the structuring of society, identity, culture, power, and history.  It chronicles the development and contributions of the African Diaspora, the ongoing manifestations of racial subjugation and the resistance against that subjugation via activist, artistic, and scholarly activities.  Africana Studies differs from “traditional” academic disciplines in that its practitioners consciously and unapologetically pursue prescriptions toward racial justice and the undoing of systemic inequity (e.g., political and representational).  The research methods of the field are necessarily interdisciplinary and intersectional (i.e., the simultaneity of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), and the knowledge produced is often comparative and global in scope.