Colin Maiwurm – Staff Writer
On Wednesday, Oct. 5, the college celebrated the ten-year anniversary of adding an African Studies minor. With this ten-year celebration came changes to the African Studies program. The minor is now called African/African Diaspora, an effort made in order to switch the focus. Before, the minor only talked about the history of Africa, but now the courses have expanded to focus more on the African diaspora. With this new focus, the college has now added more electives for students to choose from.
In addition to this minor only requiring five courses, most of those courses can also count for other requirements like humanities. Another reason for adding more electives for this major is to try to get more students involved in these studies. Even if they do not plan on minoring, students can still gain some type of required credit for taking these electives within the minor. The reason that this minor even exists is due to the student demand for it ten years ago. In response, Gustavus wants to keep progressing this minor and possibly follow what other colleges have done and add a major.
“We decided on diaspora because that encompasses people of African descent all over the world,” Director of African/African Diaspora Studies Kathleen Keller said.
With these additions also came an event to express the college’s progression for this minor. At this event, the college hosted a panel discussion with four individuals: Tish Jones, Walter Greason, Abdi Samatar, and Paschal Kyoore. “We invited people that represent different fields of study within African/African Diaspora studies: Professor Greason (Macalester College) is a historian of African American history, Professor Samatar (University of Minnesota) is in African studies because he works on geography in East Africa. Tish Jones is a poet and an activist, she is not in academia at all but we wanted to have that perspective of somebody that’s working in the field of African studies without being a professor, then Paschal Kyoore (Gustavus Adolphus College) who is the founder of the program,” Keller said. Throughout the panel discussion, each speaker was able to describe their experiences and how they ended up where they are now. Afterwards, they were all given questions regarding the changes to the college’s new African/African Diaspora minor.
With each speaker coming from a different field and with different titles, the answers were very diverse and yet they all seemed to connect together. Throughout the process, the floor did open up to allow participants to ask the speakers a question or to state their ideas regarding what the speakers were discussing. While a majority of the questioning was between Professor Keller and the speakers, there were some discussions between each of the speakers regarding the question at hand. Due to this, the speakers were able to go more in depth with their process of thinking and understanding. While this event has passed, there are still a multitude of events that focus on similar topics like this coming up, one of which is a lecture called “Afro Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country.” This event is at 6:00 p.m. on Oct. 19 at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. Another event, an author panel called “Diving Deeper: Author Panel on pan-African Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fiction,” is planned to start at 7:00 p.m. on Nov. 12 in the Library.
With events on and off campus being broadcasted by the college, they hope to peak the interest of new students who are unsure about their future. “This is a field of study where there is still so much to learn. It’s a really new and vibrant field in a lot of ways. We are opening a lot of opportunities for students. Even international students who are from Africa have something to learn by taking our classes and have something to contribute to our classes,” Professor Keller said.