International Journal of African Studies, R. Drew Smith and Bertis D. English, Guest Editors
Volume 23, Numbers 1-2, 2025
This special issue of the International Journal of Africana Studies explores the
“remembering, repressing, and repairing” of slavery devastations from several
vantage points. Charles Becknell examines contemporary efforts to suppress
Black history, with a special emphasis on the censorship of Black/Africana Studies.
Tanisha Jackson and Michael Wilson draw attention to the importance
of artistic remembrances of slavery, as conveyed through public monuments and
memorials. Daniel Morris-Chapman examines ways the transatlantic slave
trade and its abolition helped frame Anglophone identity in Cameroon and how
those framings of identity have contributed to violent conflict in the country since
2017. Ife Williams and V. Nikki Jones view commitments to reckoning with
slavery as key dividing lines between competing versions of contemporary Western
identity, distinguished from one identity construct to the other by contrasting
levels of commitment to reparatory justice.
Scholarly and popular breakthroughs toward fully accounting and acknowledging
slavery’s devastating impacts are encouraging. Nonetheless, as the widening
scholarship on slavery and activism on reparations makes clear from one political
direction and the strengthening resistance to a fuller public reckoning with slavery’s
legacies reveals from an opposite direction, the divides emanating from the history
of slavery are wide and enduring. Hence, this issue is a timely reminder that
the transdiscipline’s scholars and activists not only must remain at the forefront
of critically examining the various contributions to human history that Africana
peoples have made since antiquity but also must put those examinations “into the
service of [the ongoing and incomplete fights for] Black liberation.”