FSEM 114   Black Migrations

Faculty Profile for Professor Sanya

Investigates African-descended people’s historical and contemporary dispersal and how Black migrations have impacted and influenced aesthetics, politics and social consciousness, and cultural institutions, and engaged in debates about the quality of life of Black people within nation-states, across borders, continents, and oceans, and in new communities. Students also explore how Black revolutions migrate in political imaginations to inspire other movements for freedom. Recognizing the value of understanding complex diasporic lenses that include race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and class, students are introduced to diasporic encounters and experiences of African descendants, the formation of transnational social movements, black internationalism, Pan-Africanism, post-1965 immigration, and contemporary Black life. To this end, coursework challenges and expands students’ understandings of the diverse and complex history of people of the African Diaspora, what it means to be Black in the 21st Century, and how cultural exchanges have informed contemporary Black life in addition to migration, colonialism, slavery, and the quest for political enfranchisement.Students who successfully complete this seminar receive credit for CORE C148 and satisfy the Core Communities requirement.

Brenda N. Sanya teaches courses on the historical foundations of American education, democracy and education, the role of pedagogy in the public sphere, and the histories of Black educators and education. Her research focuses on transnational perspectives on the social construction of blackness, the function of schooling, and educative practices in ordering the lives and opportunities of minoritized people in the US and Kenya.