About the Contributors

Nafeesah Allen, cum laude graduate of Barnard College ('06), is currently working on a Master's of International Affairs at Columbia University, with a concentration in Social Policy of Race & Ethnicity and a certificate in Latin American Studies. She also serves as assistant program coordinator for Barnard College's Middle Passage Initiative. She is currently a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow with the U.S. Department of State and has been a New York City Urban Fellow and has held an International Affairs Program Fellowship at Princeton University. Her literary pieces have appeared in Hanging Loose Press's Shooting the Rat and Hanging Loose, as well as in the 2008 release Haiku from the Home of Reverend Mofo Jones. She also has photos in the traveling exhibition accompanying the book tour for the latter. Nafeesah is a native of Newark, New Jersey, and currently resides in Harlem.

Christina Ama Ata Aidoo is an acclaimed Ghanaian writer, educator, and politician. Her work in multiple genres confronts themes of both African women's struggle for agency and tensions between Africa and the West. Over some thirty years, Aidoo has published nearly a dozen pieces, including the well-known No Sweetness Here (1970), Our Sister Killjoy (1977) and Changes (1991). The latter was awarded the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Africa). Aidoo served an 18-month term as Ghana's Minister of Education from 1982-1983. She has also taught at a number of institutions of higher learning throughout Africa and the United States. In June of 2000, Aidoo founded MBAASEM, an NGO whose mission is to "relieve the burden of looking for a place to write, at least for a few women, through the provision of an enabling environment and technical support." The organization also offers awareness resources around issues of domestic violence and HIV/AIDS. She is currently a Visiting Professor of African Literature at Brown University.

Jackee Budesta Batanda lives in Kampala, Uganda. She was given the Commonwealth Short Story Competition: Africa Region award for her story "Dance with Me." Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Macmillan Writers Prize for Africa, highly commended for the Caine Prize, and published in numerous journals including Wasafiri, Moving Worlds, and Edinburgh Review. She has published The Blue Marble, a children's picture book, and written a short story collection, Everyday People. Extracts of her novel, Our Time of Sorrow, have been published in St. Petersburg Review and The Literary Review. Two of her short stories have recently been published in the Oxford Book Worm Series for Learners of English as a foreign language. Jackee has been Writer-in-Residence at Lancaster University, England, and Peace Writer at the University of San Diego, California. She has performed her work in Uganda, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States.

Makini Boothe is a 2008 graduate of Barnard College, where she studied Francophone Studies and Human Rights. A Jamaican-American ("Jamarican"), Makini is also fluent in French, studied Portuguese and plans to pursue a graduate degree in public health. She currently resides in Newark, NJ, where she is committed to community empowerment through health education. Makini's dedication to social justice stems from her belief that "the principle of the Oneness of Mankind . . . is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope . . .. It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced" (Baha'i Writings).

Gabri Christa's work merges several arts and cultures. She started making films in 2002. Her first short film "High School" was a finalist at the Dance on Camera Festival and received an ABC TV Creative Excellence Award. Her films have shown at Lincoln Center, the Monaco Dance Film Festival, the Tokyo Film Festival, Denver, Munich, and on the web through dvrepublic.org. Her new film, Another Building # 1 Quarantine, was a jury finalist at many festivals and screened in London at Constellation Change SCREEN Dance Festival, Cinedans in Amsterdam, Kunning Being, Shanghai, Capetown, and Dance Camera West in Los Angeles. Savoneta will be on permanent exhibition at a new museum and shown as an installation in several museums and galleries. Christa is a Guggenheim Fellow for choreography and a recipient of many other grants for both her choreography and film work. She holds a BA in Dance from the School for New Dance Development and has an MFA from the University of Washington. She was a dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and in Cuba with Danza Contemporanea de Cuba and DanzAbierta. She directs Danza Isa Film and Performance Production Company and serves on the board of Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. Other published writings have appeared in the award-winning book Caribbean Dance from Abekua to Zouk and in publications in the Netherlands. More information is available on her website, www.gabrichrista.com.

Yvette Christiansë is a novelist, poet, and scholar. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was raised in that city and in Cape Town, as well as in Mbabane, Swaziland. In her late teens her family moved to Australia to escape apartheid. She now lives in New York City where she teaches African American and postcolonial literatures, as well as poetics, at Fordham University.

Christine Cynn was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's Studies at Barnard College from 2008 to 2009. From 2007 to 2008, she was also the Assistant Director of Africana Studies at Barnard College. From 2005 to 2006, Chris was a Fulbright lecturer/researcher in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, where she began research on her current book project on United States-funded public health initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and production of a video documentary with women living with HIV, Un Corps Encore. She has worked on a number of other video projects, including the award-winning 2003 documentary, Pote mak sonje: The Raboteau Trial, which she co-produced. She has published an article in Women's Studies Quarterly and a book chapter in Multiculturalism and the American Self.

Angela Davis's teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She has also taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies. Davis is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture and Are Prisons Obsolete?. She is now completing a book on prisons and American history.

Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is the first African American woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law. The author of numerous articles on democratic theory, political representation, educational equity, and issues of race and gender, Guinier was first introduced to the public in 1993, when President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She is the author of Lift Every Voice, The Tyranny of the Majority, Who's Qualified?, and The Miner's Canary.

Kim F. Hall is the Lucyle Hook Professor of English and also the Director of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Previously, she held the Thomas F.X. Mullarkey Chair of Literature at Fordham University. She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Georgetown University. She teaches courses in 16th and 17th century literature, race studies, women's studies and drama. Professor Hall's first book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, helped found the field of early modern race studies and was named a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book. In addition to her 2006 book Othello: Texts and Contexts, she has published numerous articles on race in Renaissance/early modern studies and lectures widely on Shakespeare, renaissance women writers, race studies, culinary culture, visual arts, and pedagogy. She is past chair of the Shakespeare Division of the Modern Language Association and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Professor Hall has won several prestigious fellowships, including an NEH fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago and an ACLS fellowship. She is currently working on Sweet Taste of Empire, a study of the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade.

Werewere Liking is a writer, playwright and performer based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She established the Ki-Yi Mbock theatre troupe in 1980 and founded the Ki-Yi village in 1985 for the artistic education of young people. Performances by Ki-Yi Mbock include music and ritual, often using marionettes. She received a Prince Claus Award in 2000 for her outstanding and successful contributions to culture and society, and the Noma Award in 2005 for her book La Mémoire Amputée.

Amina Mama is a widely published Nigerian feminist scholar, currently the Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair at Mills College in Oakland, California. She previously served for 10 years as the first Chair in Gender Studies at the University of Cape Town's African Gender Institute, a regional teaching and research unit dedicated to intellectual work for the pursuit of gender justice in Africa. Current research interests are militarism, higher education, and the gender politics of development. Her major publications include Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge 1995), Women's Studies and Studies of Women in Africa (CODESRIA Green Book 1996), Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited, CODESRIA 1997) and articles in a wide range of academic journals. She serves as founding editor of the African journal of gender studies, Feminist Africa, chairs the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women, and sits on the Gender Advisory Committee of the African Union, the United Nations Committee for Development Planning, and the Board of Directors of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

Celia E. Naylor is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her work explores the multifaceted connections between African-Americans and Native Americans in the United States. She was one of the coordinators of the conference "'Eating Out of the Same Pot': Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories," held at Dartmouth College in April 2000. Her publications include the chapter "'Born and raised among these people, I don't want to know any other': Slaves' Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory" in the anthology Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, edited by James F. Brooks (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); the co-authored chapter (with Tiya Miles) "African Americans in Indian Societies" in the Handbook of North American Indians, volume 14: Southeast, edited by Raymond Fogelson (Smithsonian Institution, 2004); and the essay "'Playing Indian'?: The Selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation 1997-1998" in the collection Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, edited by Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles (Duke University Press, 2006). Her book African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens was published by the University of North Carolina Press in May 2008 (part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture). It focuses on the nineteenth-century experiences of enslaved and free people of African descent in the Cherokee Nation. One of her current projects examines the contemporary controversy of descendants of enslaved and free Black Cherokees in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.

Tavia Nyong'o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. The author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press 2009), Nyong'o writes on aesthetics, history, popular culture and sexuality.

Hiram Perez is a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University's Center for African American Studies. He looks forward to joining the English Department at Vassar College in the Fall of 2009. His writing has appeared in the journals Camera Obscura, Social Text, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, and Cineaste, as well as in the collections Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture. At present, he is completing a book on gay cosmopolitanism that traces the instrumentalization of homosexual desire within erotic economies of capitalism and the nation. He has also conducted seminars and workshops on "Teaching Literature of Immigration" for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and for the Save Ellis Island Foundation.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry (Ph.D., UT-Austin, Anthropology, 2005) specializes in black women's activism, African diaspora studies, critical race and feminist theories, urban geography and politics, and race relations in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has done research in Mexico, Jamaica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. Her most recent work is an ethnographic study of black women's activism in Brazilian cities, specifically an examination of black women's participation and leadership in neighborhood associations and of the re-interpretations of racial and gender identities in urban spaces.

Kathryn Tobin graduated from Barnard College in 2008, and in September 2009 will complete her Masters in African Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Her research centers on Ugandan literature, particularly FEMRITE, and the intersections between situations of conflict and literary expressions of national identity. Kathryn has studied and worked in Uganda in 2006 and 2007, and will spend this summer researching in Kampala before returning home to New York.