The Black Scholar Journal | Journal of Black Studies and Research

02/24/2025

In this meditation Garth White’s framing of rudie has been edited, revised and expanded in order to apply it to different eras of the music over time and location. His approach remains the initial touchstone for how we can understand rudie culture. In this re-imagining rudie can only be multi-dime...

01/14/2025

Thank you, Louis! We will miss you and look forward to seeing more of the incredible work you continue to gift to the world.

  By the time Louis Chude-Sokei joined the senior editorial team of TBS, in 2013, his list of scholarly achievements was impressive. Editing a journal of Black Studies, however, was not among them. I knew, though, that he would provide just what was needed to transition TBS into the 21st century. W...

01/14/2025

Now Available: 54.4, Black Independent Film in Britain.

This issue marks the end of Louis Chude-Sokei's extraordinary ten-year tenure as editor-in-chief for The Black Scholar. Stay posted for an appreciation blog post from the owner of TBS.

Thank you, Louis!

From the introduction to 54.4: “Even more than the films produced by these collectives, to see [Steve] McQueen’s Small Axe and Uprising is to see and hear the work of the one Black film and video collective that is too often left out of formal recollections of Black British image-work in the 198...

01/10/2025

Podcast Episode · The Black Studies Podcast · 01/10/2025 · 1h 13m

01/03/2025

Ivory Coast is the sixth in a growing list of African nations cutting military ties with former colonial power France.

11/12/2024

"What should we do with this marketable Africa bearing empty ideological ammo? How might we engage artists produced not by the revolutionary fervor birthed by “the end of empire” but by the pe*******on of neoliberal thinking in the domain of culture, even as those artists also appear to be reverse-engineering the flows of capital Southward, toward the continent and its peoples? Might the mainstream success of Afrobeats threatens to undermine the intracontinental synergies that acted as a crucible of the genre’s emergence in the first place?" - Dotun Ayobade

Published in The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research (Vol. 54, No. 3, 2024)

11/12/2024

Scholars, Writers, and Artists are invited to apply to the 2025-2026 Fellowship Program at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. The Fellows Program, the oldest of the Du Bois Research Institute’s activities, i...

10/29/2024

UCLA Law School invites applications for a full-time position as an Assistant Teaching Professor/Teaching Professor of Law to Direct a new Housing Justice Clinic. This is a full-time faculty position with security of employment or potential for security of employment to begin on July 1, 2025. UCLA L...

10/29/2024

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society: Harvard Divinity School invites applications for a tenured or tenure-track appointment to the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society. We seek a scholar whose work primarily focuses on....

10/24/2024

The English department at Boston University invites applications for a tenure-track position in Black American and Diasporic Cinema at the rank of Assistant Professor, starting July 1, 2025. We welcome candidates with strong research profiles in the history, culture, politics and poetics of Black ci...

09/27/2024

With artwork by Natalie Wood and a preface by David Scott, “The Vexed Universalism of Ethical Partisans,” small axe, issue 74, includes essays by Fatoumata Seck, Mary Grace Albanese, and Mónica B. …

09/09/2024

Celebrating the Life of Robert Allen. Courtesy of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

09/05/2024

And here's a great free essay on Burna Boy from the collection...

Published in The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research (Vol. 54, No. 3, 2024)

09/05/2024

Here's a link to the press release...

Cover Art by Abe Odedina   When young African musicians invite the world to a sing-along, and it obliges. When these artists beckon to the world to move its limbs this way and that, and it yields, then a critical issue becomes necessary to bear witness to this unlikely exchange. The electronic danc...

09/05/2024

Unbelievably proud to announce the publication of The Black Scholar's special issue on Afrobeats, the first scholarly/theoretical interrogation/discussion of the new African pop and it's political and social histories and implications.

09/04/2024

Now Available: Afrobeats’ Lower Frequencies, guest edited by Dotun Ayobade. Read the introduction and “'Monsters You Made”: Burna Boy, , and the Use of Restlessness," by Dotun Ayobade and Olabanke Goriola for free.

Cover Art by Abe Odedina   When young African musicians invite the world to a sing-along, and it obliges. When these artists beckon to the world to move its limbs this way and that, and it yields, then a critical issue becomes necessary to bear witness to this unlikely exchange. The electronic danc...

08/12/2024

In sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world’s most exciting emerging markets, AI innovators are helping everyone from small farmers to a rising generation of young workers to participate in a sustainable and data-driven economy.

07/22/2024

We went intellectual-digital-crate-digging and found excerpts from a 2009 interview conducted with professor Robert Allen about his development and use of In...