Annual Reports

For the period July 1, 2020 – June 30, 2021 (FY 21)
Center/Institute: Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC)
Director: Herman L. Bennett, PhD

A. MISSION:

The Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) was founded to address the African presence in the Americas through scholarly research and public programs for the betterment of the public as well as the academic community.

The institute’s mission is to foster understanding and critical interpretation of the history, development, conditions, status, and cultures of the diverse peoples of African descent living in the various societies of the Western Hemisphere. The Institute’s primary focus on the black experience in Canada and the United States, Central and South America, and the Caribbean does not preclude any region of the African Diaspora from the scope of its multidisciplinary scholarship and public programs.

As a component of our mission, IRADAC will develop and facilitate the creation of a community of independent scholars at the Graduate Center interested in the study of the African Diaspora. In addition, the Institute will inform and influence the formulation of public and academic policy, particularly with respect to education, through its research initiatives, and public programs.

IRADAC in its brief existence, with limited resources and a prolonged leadership transition has had considerable impact in shaping the intellectual and institutional conversations concerning the African Diaspora at the international, national, regional and local levels.  In terms of scholarship on the Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Studies, IRADAC and its affiliated faculty have been defining voices.  The “Caribbean Epistemology Seminar” simply put IRADAC and the Graduate Center on the map as a significant force in things concerning the Caribbean Studies.  The same needs to be said for Afro-Latin American Studies in which IRADAC has had an even more impactful presence.  IRADAC has also partnered with the Freie Universität in Berlin to establish the Afro Atlantic Research Group (https://www.africanatlantic.org/about-aarg) which features robust collaboration between the CUNY/GC Faculty and Students and those of the Freie Universität.  IRADAC has also had a close relationship with the premier scholarly institution devoted to the study of the African Diaspora, the Association for the Study of the World-Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD), having co-sponsored its inaugural conference at the CUNY twenty-years ago and since that time having regularly hosted several of its events and members.

IRADAC works closing and regularly collaborates with Africana Studies Certificate Program, the Seminar for Globalization & Social Change, PhD Programs in Anthropology, English, Geography, History, and Sociology; its relationship with American Studies Certificate Program and Global Early Modern Studies is quite consistent.  IRADAC has had a strong relationship with Black Studies at City College, Hunter College, and Lehman College which under the new Director will be revitalized and strengthened.  IRADAC’s relationship with NYPL, especially the Schomburg Library is one of its strongest and most important institutional relationships which the IRADAC various Schomburg Fellowships consistently reinforce.  IRADAC has begun to explore collaboration with NYU’s Center for the African Diaspora, IRAAS at Columbia University, and has worked very closely with NYU Working Group on Slavery and Freedom affiliated with the Department in Social Cultural Analysis.

IRADAC is the singular institute and entity at CUNY that focuses on the African diaspora throughout the Americas and globally.  As an institute, it brings together scholars and students in ways that simply is not manifest anywhere else on the CUNY campus.  This is both the singular strength and a challenge for IRADAC since it means that it needs to constantly be privy to new hires, scholarly departures, shifting intellectual agendas and priorities of its dispersed constituency.  In terms of its public mission and public programming it shares its responsibility with the limited programming on the African Diaspora, Caribbean Studies, Afro-Latin American Studies, and African Studies that does, in fact, take place on the colleges.  Still, without IRADAC CUNY’s intellectual and public programming, as it relates the African Diaspora, would be severely limited.

B.  ACTIVITIES / Accomplishments, Projects, Highlights

Include publications or productions (film/videos, exhibitions), scholarly papers in refereed journals, papers presented at professional meetings, books and book chapters, lectures, seminars and educational activities such as curriculum development, teacher training, or faculty development.

IRADAC sponsored the panelist lead lecture series which asks the question: What Matter Now? Social and political movements of the past have given passage to crucial gains in the call for civil rights, justice, and equality. But might there be a need for inspired individualism and grassroots organizing, that reinforces a sustained level of activism? What Matters Now? asks us to consider the forms of transformative activism necessary in the present that engage daily life, the wellbeing of humanity, the environment, and a democratic society.

• What Matter Now? Women Writers of Color with panelists Vilna Bashi Treitler and Natasha Chipembere

• What Matter Now? CUNY Teaches Living History with panelists Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum and George W. Contreras

• What Matter Now? African American Political Thought with panelists Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner with contributor Farah Jasmine Griffin

• What Matter Now? Hip Hop Activism, Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South with panelists Regina N. Bradley and Jill Richardson

In academic 2020-2021, IRADAC also sponsored three post-doctoral fellows (administratively categorized as Research Associates), two new Research Associates and one renewal from the previous academic year. 

In its brief existence, the post-doctoral fellowship associated with the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) has had a transforming effect on the Graduate Center and CUNY’s intellectual and institutional landscape.  Five years after its establishment, IRADAC’s Post-doctoral Fellowship has attracted international and national attention, as reflected in the robust fellowship application pool.  Both cohorts of three Post-Doctoral Fellows, moreover, have had a substantial intellectual presence on the Fellows’ disciplinary homes in the Programs (GC) and Departments (CUNY).  Through sustained engagement with graduate students at various levels, the post-doctoral fellowship has brought considerable pedagogical and professional vitality to the Doctoral Degree Programs as it relates to the current state of scholarship in the Fellows’ disciplines.

The Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program, as envisioned by the former Director Robert Reid-Pharr, brought substance to IRADAC’s stated mission.  Before its establishment and the appointment of Professor Reid-Pharr as Director, IRADAC had a marginal institutional existence while offering a small cadre of black students an island of comfort.  In this capacity, IRADAC did not live up to its mission nor did it have a presence among faculty at the GC or the CUNY Colleges.  This changed under Professor Reid-Pharr’s tenure during which the Post-doctoral Fellowship Program was established.  By asking faculty from various disciplines throughout CUNY to serve on the search committees and asking others to serve both as mentors to the Fellows but also as professional conduits to our graduate students, the Post-doctoral Fellowship Program brought intellectual and institutional dynamism to various disciplines and fields involving the study of race, ethnicity, and racial formation.  IRADAC bolstered its institutional presence throughout the Graduate Center and CUNY through the Post-Doctoral Fellows Program, notably through the seminars, conferences and structured programs involving the Fellows.  In turn, the faculty at the Colleges and the GC along with the graduate students and advanced undergraduates came began to realize the promise and potential of IRADAC.

The IRADAC Fellowship Program is a matter of intellectual substance that enables us as an intellectual community to be in line with CUNY’s mission but also the promise of the largest urban public PhD granting institution in the nation.

Aside from Tsedale Melaku, the new Research Associates were:

Tatiana Benjamin, PhD:
Tatiana Benjamin, the recipient of numerous graduate fellowships, received her PhD in American Studies in 2018 from the University of Maryland.  She has a MA in African-American Studies from UCLA and received her BA from Clark University in Atlanta.  From 2018-2019, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  At present, she is a Senior Research Analyst for UndocuBlack Network (UBN) in Washington, DC.

Dr. Benjamin main project, which builds on her dissertation, is entitled: “Black Removal and Invisibility at the Intersections of Race & Citizenship in the 21^st Century”.  This timely and field-redefining project concerns itself with ways that deportation can serve as “lens to examine antiblackness, borders and citizenship” within contemporary America. At a moment when immigrants are vilified, targeted and rounded up for deportation, Benjamin’s work illustrates how the immigrant—legal or illegal—is rarely configured as black.  This invisibility and its implications offer a distinctive lens for analyzing the work of race and racial basis as it pertains to the immigration and the politics of advocacy for immigrants. 

Benjamin systematically elucidates the working of anti-blackness as it relates to immigration and contemporary border politics. Benjamin’s groundbreaking work and presence was a considerable asset to IRADAC along with the GC’s faculty and students in such Programs like Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology.  The strengths of racial formation, ethnicity, and the study of immigrants made the GC and CUNY ideal institutional locations for Dr. Benjamin while her original work filled a gap in our existing expertise.  If it were not for COVID-19, Benjamin’s presence would have been truly invaluable for our students many of whom are researching and writing immigrants and the contemporary immigration crisis.  Her presence and scholarship have, however, enriched existing strengths associated with Richard Alba, Nancy Foner, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Phil Kasnitz, John Mollenkop and Carla Shedd while offering a unique and necessary perspective to the intersection of race and immigration.

Nathalie Pierre, PhD:
Nathalie Pierre, the recipient of a distinguished University of California Dissertation Fellowship among other multi-year awards, received her PhD in History from NYU in 2018.   Her dissertation is entitled: “The Vessel of Independence…Must Save Itself: Haitian Statecraft 1789-1815.”  Before matriculating as a graduate student on the prestigious Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship, Pierre received her BA in History and English from Howard University.

Pierre’s scholarship on both Haiti and the Haitian Revolution is potentially field defining.  Her dissertation advances Haitian Studies, which is the last decade has been a transformational subfield in study of the African diaspora.  What Pierre shows, in her much-discussed study, is that the Haitian Revolution was the site of various and competing fields of political thought including ideas that emanated from Central Africa.  Such a claim is bold and innovative in view that the Haitian Revolution, when acknowledged, is merely seen as military event involving enslaved person engaged in resistance.  What Pierre argues, building on the history of ideas, intellectual history and political thought, is that enslaved Africans brought to bear their ideas of freedom, sovereignty, state and nation which they enacted in the wake of their victory.  Such claims, carefully documented and elucidated, represent a bold intervention in the discipline of History, Political Thought and Anthropology.

Dr. Pierre was a notable and needed presence at the Graduate Center where the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is a principle area of inquiry among graduate students in the PhD Program working with James Oakes, David Waldstreicher, Helena Rosenblatt, and Herman Bennett.  Students in English, many of whom work on the same time period, would have been drawn to Dr. Pierre as would the numerous students and faculty working on the Caribbean at the Graduate Center and throughout CUNY if COVID-19 had not truncated normal channels on intellectual interaction.  Still, Dr. Pierre was an important contributor to CUNY’s prominent Program in Haitian Studies placing her in constant with the college-based faculty and students.

The presence of the three Research Associates meant that IRADAC played an active role in faculty development.  Notably in the Fall term, the Director, held a regular seminar with the Research Associates in which the participants shared their work, discussed professional development and honed their job talks.  We are happy to report that two of the three Research Associates landed tenure-track academic position at Howard University and James Madison University respectively.

SUPPLEMENTAL QUESTION:

What has been the impact of the university’s transition to distance modalities? 

All of our limited public programming in 2020-2021 was mediated through Zoom. We also held a regular seminar via Zoom in the Fall semester for the Research Associates.

C.  ACTIVITIES ASSESSMENT

Under the direction of Herman L. Bennett, we engaged in a wholesale strategic rethinking of IRADAC, its mission, its outreach, academic and intellectual offerings, its webpage and social media presence, and its relationship to the CUNY-wide and GC faculty.

We were able to transition to the Zoom online platform to build upon our successes in the 2019/2020 academic year in order to maintain our base of supporters and participants and to bring new individuals and organizations into the IRADAC orbit.

D.  PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

What are the goals and planned activities for the Center/Institute for the academic year 2021-2022?  How will these activities be funded?

In 2021-2022, IRADAC will begin to implement and operationalizes some of its strategic rethinking including refining its mission and mission statement, its outreach at various levels, expand its academic and intellectual offerings, introduce a new webpage and enhance its social media presence while strengthening its relationship to the CUNY-wide and GC faculty and related interdisciplinary and disciplinary entities.  We are actively pursuing foundation grants and philanthropic support.

E.  ADVISORY BOARD

At present, we rely on the old Advisory but by the end of July 2021 a new Advisory Board will be in place.

Juan Battle (Graduate Center, Sociology)
Herman Bennett (Graduate Center, History)
Dana-Ain Davis (Queens College, Anthropology)
Tanisha Ford (Graduate Center, History)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Graduate Center, Earth & Environmental Sciences)
Edith Gonzalez (Graduate Center, Research & Sponsored Programs) 
Donald Robotham (Graduate Center, Anthropology)
Martin Ruck (Graduate Center, Psychology)
Tyler Schmidt (Lehman College, English)
Carla Shedd (Graduate Center, Sociology & Urban Education)

F.  BROCHURE/SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media presence:
IRADAC GC | Facebook
https://www.instagram.com/IRADAC_GC/
@IRADAC_GC on Twitter