Happy Monday everyone!
My name is Jada Gannaway. I am a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the department of History at MSU. I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. I received my bachelor’s degree in History from North Carolina Central University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in the Fall of 2019. I moved to Michigan three and half years ago to pursue my PhD in Comparative Black History. My research interests include Caribbean History, Black Left politics, Black women’s history, and Black Comparative history. My dissertation, “Unsung Heroines: A Political Biography of Altheia Jones-Lecointe 1945-1975”, explores the transnational landscape of the Black Power Movement in Trinidad and London through the biographical account of Trinidadian-born, Altheia Jones-Lecointe. “Unsung Heroines” addresses the gap in the scholarship on Black women activism in the global Black Liberation Movement and Black Power studies. My study is the first comprehensive study to examine the political life of Altheia Jones-Lecointe and her transatlantic connections in two locales during the Black Power era.
My interest in digital cultural heritage developed in undergrad where I worked alongside my professor, Dr. Tony Frazier, on a digital StoryMap project. During that project we documented the single stories of enslaved people who were forcibly removed from their homeland (Africa and the Caribbean) and taken to North America and Europe after gaining their freedom from their White enslavers. After graduating from my alma mater and beginning my PhD program, I tried to a find way to integrate my love for history and my nascent skills in digital heritage to tell a more complete history of the Black experience across time and space that was not confined by borders. What I hope to accomplish this year with the CHI fellowship is to explore the transnational history of Black left activism in the Caribbean through an unspecified mapping tool. I intend to chart the proliferation of Black Power activists organizing efforts that challenged anti-Black discrimination and state violence across the diaspora. During this fellowship, I aim to highlight the coordinated activities of Black left activists’ outside of the U.S., who though were influenced by the US Black Panther Party, created their own collective that resisted White colonialism and demanded and promoted Black autonomy, racial pride, self-determination. My objective is to further engage a wider audience on twentieth century Black resistance movements that extend beyond the U.S. By employing a distinct approach to this transnational and comparative history more people will have access to the obscured stories of Black left activists in the Caribbean.
Furthermore, I hope that the tools I learn from the CHI Graduate fellowship will expand my knowledge on the value of cultural heritage and digital pedagogy. In addition to learning about various mapping tools, I wish to learn about different software’s that can be used to digitize and preserve archival records. The Alma Jordan Library, located at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine campus, in Trinidad and Tobago, houses one of the largest archives on Dr. Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and the Black Power Revolution of 1970. Unfortunately, many of their documents are not digitized which presents a challenge for scholars and the public who would like to access those records but cannot due to financial and travel constraints. With the knowledge that I gain from CHI I hope to launch an initiative that will support the digitization of the library’s collection of Black Power newspaper clippings and Eric Williams.
So, stay tuned!
Recent Comments