The South within the North

This chapter describes the work of SisterLove, an Atlanta-based organization that takes an avowedly intersectional approach to fighting AIDS among Black women, also turned its attention to AIDS in Africa during the 1990s. Dázon Dixon Diallo, the founder and CEO of SisterLove, got her start in women’s health as a student at Spelman College, where she became involved in the abortion rights movement as well as in the Black women’s health movement. Those early experiences would shape her approach to AIDS education through SisterLove, where she took care to include all kinds of Black women in the group’s outreach, at times focusing specifically on rural women, recently incarcerated women, and women in public housing. Dixon Diallo and SisterLove started from the notion that AIDS programs for African American women needed to address the ways that their lives were shaped by the simultaneous interlocking oppressions of racism and sexism. As the group expanded into South Africa, it also considered the ways that other axes of power, including those of class, region, and nation, shaped Black women’s experiences with AIDS and thus should shape SisterLove’s work as well.

Decoding Black Iconography

The paper examines how the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the only one in the country dedicated to the work of African descended women artists, is used as a pedagogical tool in the interdisciplinary African Diaspora and the World course to help students further explore the depiction and visualization of diasporan aesthetics during their matriculation. From a visual culture perspective, this is a critical examination of the process of looking among non-art major college goers. The emphasis of the analysis is on the perceiver or the “educand” as Paulo Freire puts it, and ways she is trained to visually represent Africa and its diasporas. The article discusses how the subjects, first year students at a black liberal arts women’s college, are taught to construct meaning from and respond to imagery made by women artists from the diaspora. At the heart of the study is the response of the perceivers, through an Audio Narrative assignment, to artefacts that communicate an African and Afro-descended iconography.

Toward an Understanding of "Ashé" as an Aesthetic Condition

As an artist and cultural investigator specializing in contemporary art theory and practice, my area of research is centered on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions, rediscoveries and reinventions in the African diaspora. As an educator, my pedagogical interest is in constructing new and innovative teaching methods to critically analyze works of art. I was therefore eager to introduce the concept of ashé as an aesthetic criterion to my students and colleagues but needed to test my hypothesis. To that end I created a research project to assess the viabilityof my hypothesis. The results of my investigation led to the creation of a series of four weekly workshops that challenge participants to conduct critical analyses of works of art using ashé as a criterion along with the accepted formal elements of art and principles of design. To date, I have conducted these workshops with a diverse population of students from Spelman College, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Emory University and Colgate University. Spelman College’s African Diaspora and the World program (ADW)1 has embraced my project and a number of faculty members have used it in the classroom with promising results. The primary purpose of this essay is to introduce the project to a broader audience of students, educators, and scholars.

Implementing an Intervention in the Spelman College African Diaspora and the World Course

This article describes an interdisciplinary team of researchers’ exploration of the impact of metacognitive instruction on first-year students enrolled in Spelman’s signature course—African Diaspora and the World (ADW). The two-phased, randomized controlled trial influenced administrators to increase the number of ADW sections, focused faculty discussions on pedagogy rather than content, emphasized the interdisciplinary perspective of the course, used a long-term developmental approach to professional development, and required all students to use ADW peer tutoring. The majority of faculty and students viewed these changes positively.

Introduction

I am honored to represent the intellectual contributions of Spelman College’s faculty in this special issue. This publication is the first formal collection of scholarly and pedagogical articles on African Diaspora and the World (ADW) courses at Spelman College. We recently celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of our ADW Program, so the issue marks both a trajectory in a specific historically Black college as well as the intentional move towards internationalizing the educational enterprise in the United States. The contributors are faculty and program directors (past and present), writing on teaching and scholarship in ADW. I believe this issue is a timely intervention, especially when we read headlines like: “Americans Need to Learn More about World Outside America” (Gibbons) and “Why Many Americans Are Simply Clueless About Global Events” (Nelson). Eschewing neoliberal trends, the ADW story is a deliberative journey that dismantles false narratives of frontiers by embracing critical and analytical pedagogical frameworks and scholarship.

“Shakespeare for All Times and Peoples”: Shakespeare at Spelman College and the Atlanta University Center

In this paper I explore what it means to require Shakespeare at a historically black college by looking at Adrienne Herndon's 1906 essay “Shakespeare at Atlanta University” and W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Despite the frequent association of Shakespeare requirements with a conservative agenda, both Herndon and Du Bois imagine possibilities for powerful politics in the performance and study of Shakespeare. Reading these two texts together suggests that teaching, studying, and performing Shakespeare might still be powerful politics at black institutions.