Over the next two years, I plan to conduct research on Black cultural politics in the 20th century. More specifically, I am interested in how Pan-African thought was adopted by the black masses and black popular culture. Also, I hope to study how foreign movements and theory, specifically Marxist and Communist theory, affected the emergence and popularity of black popular culture.
Studying Abroad: Giselle Furlonge
Anne Henochowicz
This year I will research the music and ideology surrounding the qin, or Chinese lute. I will explore how the qin repertoire and musicianship reflects Confucian ideals, as well as the disjuncture between this "qin ideology" and the actual music.
Jacquelin King
With a major in cultural anthropology and minors in urban education, English, and African studies, I have very interdisciplinary interests. I have produced an ethnography on Sayre High School and a preliminary study of its social environment through ongoing community-based research work. I have also co-authored a collaborative piece on arts education at Sayre in 2003, the status quo and recommendations for improvement. In 2004 I travelled to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate tertiary educational institutions and I left intrigued with a certain ethnic category, "oyinbo," and conceptions of otherness. Currently, I am producing a paper on opinions of fatherhood among unmarried parents using data from Princeton's Fragile Families study, and I would like to devote more time to child studies, or descriptive reviews of children.
Fatimah Muhammad
Currently, I am studying the phenomenon of African Americans in chieftaincy. I intend to collect narratives about African American experiences in Ghana generally and in chieftaincy specifically. I am particularly interested in whether African American Chiefs and Queen Mothers problematize their role as non-native traditional leaders. If so, how so and are these concerns ever resolved? Do African Americans deploy available social, political, and historical narratives to construct a new identity? If so, from where do they find these narratives? I treat the accounts I collect as sites for discussion of three central themes: African American perceptions of and connections to Africa (specifically Ghana), the potentialities and interpretations of Diasporan identity, and the interpretations and consequences of the tourist/host relationship.
