Programs and Events

Thank you for your interest in the Center for Africana Studies' annual programs.  To view recordings of our events, please visit our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpnfSLphqxoRoQXTI-c1n8w

Dr. Masonya Bennett, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, "The Great Global North Escape & What It Means for the Global South: Black on Black Tourism, Entrepreneurship, and Other Transnational Exchanges in the Neoliberal African Diaspora."

In 2019, U.S-based Black American travelers spent 129.6 billion on domestic and international leisure travel, yet this demographic remains largely understudied (MMGY 2021). Ghana’s Year of Return campaign in 2019 presented a clear impetus directing Black Americans’ return to Africa with an emphasis on “roots tourism” and opportunities for economic investment as an incentive for relocation. At the same time, due to proximity, more affordable travel costs, and the realization of prominent African descendent populations outside of the US and Africa, countries such as Brazil and Colombia have become major destinations for Black American tourists and expats. My on-going research aims to (re)shift our understandings of resistance, movements, and migrations from those associated with the Transatlantic Slave Trade to those stirred by Contemporary Globalization. Further, by reconceptualizing the idea of migration as an upward trajectory from “South” to “North” to one of “North” to “South,” my work endeavors toward an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of the ways in which sociocultural and economic exchanges premised on interactions between Black American tourists/expats and Afro-descendants in the Global South foster transnational forms of economic sustainability, resistance, and collective identity. The study also begs the question of how Black Americans potentially reify Global North socioeconomic hierarchies, intra-racially, within the Global South.

Date: November 13, 2024

Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Location: ALC4103 (Academic Learning Center)

To join us online, please follow this link:

https://ksuhub.com/cas-nov-13