Promoting Academic Excellence and Social Responsibility
The Voice of Black Studies
NCBS Newsletter August 2007
In This Issue
Member's Book Publications
NCBS Mourns a Loss
Feature Article
NCBS Receives Grant
32nd Annual Conference
ATLANTA, GA
March 19-22, 2008
 
 
Please join us as we celebrate our 32nd annual conference 
March 19-22, 2008 in Atlanta, GA.  The local arrangment committee will be working hard to make it a successful conference. 
 
The conference will be held at the Renassiance Atlanta Hotel Downtown.
 
 
Please see Call for Papers details below.
CALL FOR PAPERS
 

NCBS is now accepting abstracts for papers, films and panels, for our upcoming conference, that explore the African World experience from an interdisciplinary global perspective.  Of particulary interest are those presentations that approach the discipline of Africana Studies using a multi-layered framework that incorporates various combinations of class, race, gender or womanist, Afro-Centric, cross-cultural, multi-cultural, postmodernist, postcolonial, comparative and diasporic perspectives.

 
SPACES ARE LIMITED!!

 

Submission Deadline is October 19, 2007

Submission Guidelines

NCBS HIGHLIGHTS OUR MEMBER'S BOOK PUBLICATIONS

 Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism 

By
Christel N. Temple
University of Maryland, Baltimore County 
 
Published by
Carolina Academic Press
 
Cheikh Anta Diop Conference
Winner of the 2005 Award for Best Scholarly Book!

Book Description
In All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou writes lyrically and reflectively about her sentimental experience as an African American abroad in post-independence Ghana. Literary Pan-Africanism, a companion study, updates the complex historical relationship between Africans and African Americans in an era where travel, education, immigration, technology, and global exchange have broadened the definition of the African American.
(Editorial Review from Amazon.com)
 
 
Click here to order this book or view other NCBS authors.
 
If you are a current member of NCBS and would like your book highlighted in our newsletter and promoted on our website please click here for more information.
 
Please note books are chosen at random to be highlighted in the newsletter.

 

Quick Links...
Official journals of NCBS.  Please click the links below for more information.
 
 
CALL FOR ARTICLES
The Voice of Black Studies
 
 
The Voice of Black Studies is accepting articles to be considered for our upcoming editions.  These articles (500-1000 words) may be on topics that approach the discipline of Africana Studies from a broad range of perspectives.  If you are interested in submitting an article please click here for more information.
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Greetings!

On behalf of the National Council for Black Studies we are pleased to provide you with another edition of our electronic newsleltter.  We look forward to continue serving you.
NCBS MOURNS THE LOSS OF
DR. ASA G. HILLIARD, III

Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III, world renowned Pan-Africanist educator, historian, and psychologist, passed from this life on August 13, 2007 in Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Hilliard was in Egypt to deliver a keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization (ASCAC), an organization in which he was one of the founders. He was also lecturing for a study trip led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago. The cause of death is attributed to complications from malaria.  "Dr. Hilliard was in his favorite place, with his favorite person - our mother, when he died," said his daughter, Robi Hilliard Herron.

On March 17, 2007, Dr. Hilliard was the plenary speaker at NCBS's conference in San Diego, CA. The plenary session was titled, "Critical Issues Effecting the Achievement of African Americans".   This session was greatly attended and enjoyed.  A great scholar and friend to many will truly be missed.

FEATURE ARTICLE

Julian Kunnie                 The University of Arizona

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

AFRICA: CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION, NOW DECRIED AS BARBARISM

Not a day goes without some reference to some catastrophe occurring in Africa that describes a continent that is best by plagues, besieged by famine and drought, terrorized by military regimes and seemingly unending "corrupt" governments, underlined by distinctive violence against women, and witness to the irruption of the most lethal diseases in the world from malaria and tuberculosis to West Nile virus and AIDS.  Arizona has become the place where "Africanized killer bees" roam, according to newspaper reports here, in comparison to their counterpart "docile Europeanized bees!"  Think about Africa, and the image of darkened "jungles," cannibalism, and orgiastic bloody human sacrifices immediately come to mind, evoking images from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  Yet, most educated people fail to realize that these transmogrified images of Africa have little basis in reality; they are figments of the racist European imagination that served to legitimate and reinforce the holocaust of slavery in which millions of Africans were forcibly kidnapped and taken in chains to lands in the Western hemisphere stolen from Indigenous people and colonized for the extraction of vital natural materials necessary for the wheels of Western European industrialism.   Africa has never perpetrated injustices against peoples of other continents, yet like the film, Sankofa, so poignantly illustrated, has been sacrificed at the altar of Western European prosperity.  European civilizations grew fat and lives high off the hog, as Chinweizu painstakingly argues in his classic, The West and the Rest of Us, at Africa's expense.  Africa is still scorned by the West especially, even though her people, her labor, her lands, and her resources have been consistently pillaged, plundered, and raped for five centuries, hence her condition of economic impoverishment today, entrapped by fratricidal wars, political repression, economic subjugation, and environmental devastation.  
Read Entire Article
NCBS RECEIVES GRANT FROM THE
FORD FOUNDATION
The Ford Foundation awarded NCBS $238,000 over a three-year period to strengthen its program leadership, and management capacity.  The specific activities of this grant include: 1) the development and implementation of Summer Institutes and pre-conference workshops; 2) development of a strategic plan that includes new branding; 3) research grants to junior faculty; 4) travel grants to Ph.D. students to increase membership; 5) publication of the proceedings from "Conversations on Sustaining Black Studies in the 21st Century" [1055-1330] in a special issue of the International Journal of Africana Studies; 6) professional development for the Executive Director, and other enhancements to improve the organization's accountability and responsiveness to its members.  The grant should permit NCBS to expand its influence and service capacity in the field of Africana Studies.
VISIT THE STUDENT'S CORNER
Student Please visit our website's new Student's Corner. This page is specially designed for the student members and supporters of NCBS.  Here students can get direct information on our annual student essay contest, the honor society or other resources. Students also have access to the student message board. Please feel free to post your comments, announcements, invitations and much more.
 
BECOME A LIFE MEMBER OF NCBS
 
NCBS now has a lifetime membership category. Enjoy a lifetime of benefits. 
 
For more information...
On behalf of NCBS we appreciate your support.  I hope you enjoyed this edition of our newsletter. If you have any comments or suggestions we welcome your feedback.
 
Sincerely,
 

Summer L. Melay, Executive Director
National Council for Black Studies, Inc.