Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor

Contact Info:

Office Location:	243 Friedl Building
Email Address:

Teaching (Fall 2012):

• AAAS 330.01, FILM AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA Synopsis

  Friedl Bdg 240, TuTh 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

  (also cross-listed as VMS 228.01, WOMENST 250.01)

Specialties:

Diaspora Studies
Cultural Studies

Research Interests:

I am a former Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London in the U.K., where I taught for ten years. I am currently a Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. I have two primary research interests. Utilizing the transnational circulation of people as a paradigm (in particular, the human smuggling and sex trafficking of recent clandestine West African migrant women and men to southern Europe), I am working on a theoretical book, which has three main objectives. First, it rethinks what constitutes volition and agency as well as coercion and consent as a way to address human rights concerns of both protection and prevention. Second, it repositions these transnational/extracolonial migrations as multilayered and "overlapping" new African diasporas within the African Diaspora paradigm, wherein transatlantic slavery has conventionally been the dominant narrative. In doing so, it argues for a reassessment of what constitutes persecution and victimhood. Third, by situating these scattered, strategic and complex movements within not outside the latest political economic circuits of global capitalism, it unsettles the conceptual tidiness of both Europe and Africa as discursive, historical and geopolitical formations. For fifteen years, in England, I was also engaged in feminist auto-ethnographic and narrative research on critical 'mixed race' identities politics, family, and memory. Situated in the former slave port city of Bristol, this longitudinal field work examined the lived and remembered experiences of those who,as active agents, identify as and/or are socially designated as 'mixed race'. This project also addressed the cultural paradoxes of kin and color as problematic social applications of a term predicated on the bases of 'race' science fiction. Subsequently, I located this British work within the broader and comparative context of historical and emergent 'mixed race' studies in North America. That is, I traced the evolution of multidisciplinary discourses on 'mixed race' as both an intellectual 'idea' and a social movement.

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. J.O. Ifekwunigwe, 'Black Folk Here and There': Repositioning Other(ed) African diaspora(s) in/and Europe, in The African Diaspora and the Disciiplines, edited by T.Olaniyan and J.Sweet (2010), pp. 313-338, Indiana University Press [PDF] [PDF]
2. J.O. Ifekwunigwe, Venus and Serena are 'Doing it' for Themselves: Theorizing Sporting Celebrity, Marxism and Black Feminisms for "The Hip-Hop Generation", in Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, edited by B.Carrington and I.McDonald (2009), pp. 130-153, Routledge [PDF] [PDF]
3. J.O. Ifekwunigwe, An Inhospitable Port in the Storm: Recent Clandestine West African Migrants and the Quest for Diasporic Recognition, in The Situated Politics of Belonging, edited by N.Yuval-Davis, K.Kannibiran, and U.Vieten (2006), pp. 84-99, Sage and International Sociological Association [PDF]
4. J.O. Ifekwunigwe, Recasting 'Black Venus' in the 'new' African Diaspora, in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, edited by K.Clarke and D.Thomas (2006), pp. 206-225, Duke University Press
5. J.O. Ifekwunigwe, Recasting 'Black Venus' in the 'new' African Diaspora, Womens Studies International Forum. special issue on 'Representing Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.', vol. 27 (2004), pp. 397-412 [PDF]

Graduate Students