Columbia University: SOCIAL JUSTICE MINI GRANT

For our first episode of Season 5, we interviewed current U.S. Diplomat and Columbia University graduate student in the School of International and Public Affairs–– Fareed Abdullah. Together, we chatted about the “art of being a diplomat.”

Fareed Abdullah (he/him) is a U.S. diplomat taking a sabbatical from diplomacy to think, write, and perfect the theory behind the art of being a diplomat. He comes to the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia with more than 14 years of experience at the U.S. Department of State. Fareed has worked and lived in several countries around the world like Senegal, China, and the United Arab Emirates, speaks several languages, and enjoys the process of learning new ways of addressing persistent challenges. 

 Kay Kemp (they/them) is a first-year PhD student in the English Department, Theater Colloquium. Their research focuses on postcolonial playwriting, particularly research which encounters the postcolonial play in diaspora, such as the writings of Africa and the Caribbean. Their research is colored both by their investment in the theoretical aspects of theater and their prior experience with postcoloniality in literature and political science courses, and by their practical experience in the field; Kay is a produced playwright, having written and staged work which has appeared in multiple festivals, including Off-Broadway. They are excited to be continuing their education at Columbia University, where they completed their undergraduate degree.

 Columbia University offered me the unique opportunity to use MCN as a tool to record/archive oral interviews and promote this content more widely. As a result, the SJMG allowed me to study and practice the act of legitimizing an “artistic medium” and its cultural-historical relevance while highlighting anti-colonial efforts rooted in performative acts of self-expression. I’m most interested in continuing to study how empirical approaches taken by scholars in varying fields and their studies (or artistic expressions) can more effectively emphasize the African diaspora’s interactions with the world, outside the conventional Western-centric perspective. 

In short, the SJMG allowed me to discover and practice two different aspects of my research–– the theoretical and practical skills. For instance, the two episodes of MCN speak to the ways in which the SJMG allowed me to practically study and execute the tools that I am “reading” and “speaking about,” while the third asset, my paper, speaks to the theoretical approaches I am learning to examine and utilize as a budding scholar and researcher at CU. 

This paper through a visual analysis of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Josephine Baker takes an ambitious, diachronic approach to the question of world-making by asking how and why the famous danse sauvage performance of Josephine Baker informed the cultural politics of post-independence Negritude and pan-Africanism, as represented at the Dakar festival of 1966. The paper works with concepts developed by Adom Getachew and Stuart Hall to posit a connection between these two events.