CBH Talk | Africa Reframed: Rethinking a Continent's History
Howard French, Dan Magaziner, and Lovia Gyarkye challenge how Africa's history has been told—and by whom—arguing the continent is central, not peripheral, to modernity.
Why we picked this
Howard French spent years documenting how Africa was written out of the story of the modern world—and this conversation makes the case for putting it back in.
The Center for Brooklyn History, in partnership with BAM and the DanceAfrica festival, brings together three writers and historians to ask how Africa’s history has been shaped, distorted, and what it would look like to get it right. The conversation directly confronts the historical distortions that have positioned Africa as peripheral to modernity rather than constitutive of it.
Howard French is a Columbia University journalism professor and author of Born in Blackness, which makes the sweeping argument that the Atlantic slave trade—and Africa’s role in it—is the actual foundation of the modern world economy. Dan Magaziner is a Yale historian specializing in twentieth-century African intellectual and cultural history. Lovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope and contributing editor to Africa is a Country, two of the most important venues for contemporary writing about and from the continent.
Presented alongside the DanceAfrica festival at BAM, this event connects historical reconsideration with living artistic traditions rooted in African culture. Free admission; registration encouraged.