FROM NKRUMAH’S BLACK STAR TO THE AFRICAN DIASPORA – Bright Gyamfi

Presenter: Bright Gyamfi
Bright Gyamfi is a Fulbright scholar and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Northwestern University. Prior to attending Northwestern, Gyamfi received a BA from the University of Notre Dame with honors where he majored in history and political science. After his undergraduate studies, he was awarded the Thomas J. McMahon IV Endowment for Excellence for the Pursuit of Scholarship at the University of Oxford where he earned an MSc in African Studies. His research examines Ghanaian intellectuals who transformed and radicalized the study of Africa in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-IIE, etc. His work has appeared in the African Studies Review, the Journal of African American History, The Conversation, and Africa is a Country.

Chair: Dr. Samuel A. Ntewusu
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon

Abstract
After Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, a group of Ghanaian intellectuals brought their specific version of Pan-Africanism into the United States at precisely the moment when Black Studies programs were being formed. Consequently, they shaped the trajectory of the field and linked it to a specifically African intellectual project. These Ghanaian intellectuals sought to inject an Africa-centered sense of what political education and political mobilization meant into the framework of Black Studies. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University, they worked to make Europe’s ongoing economic exploitation of Africa, the persistence of white supremacist regimes in southern Africa, and the US government’s support of these oppressive forces key parts of the otherwise US-centric curricula of Black Studies programs. The role that Ghanaian intellectuals played in the United States helps us illuminate the unexplored intellectual impact of African scholars in the 1970s and 1980s outside of Africa on Black internationalism.

Convenor: Chika C. Mba

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