Woodson Fellows

Amanda Gibson

Amanda White Gibson is a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary. Her research uncovers the credit market experiences of those most vulnerable to the externalities associated with the slavery-based capitalist economy. It describes enslaved and free African Americans’ use of credit from the American Revolution to the Civil War; how enslaved individuals borrowed to free themselves, what happened when they did not pay debts imposed on them by the jail system, and free and enslaved African Americans’ employment of credit at stores and banks. It also attempts to describe how African Americans in Virginia conceived of debt in their own lives, for example using debt, with varying degrees of success, as a tool to distance themselves from slavery and racial oppression.

F. Delali Kumavie

"Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through Air, Airplane, and Airport"

My dissertation extends the vital loci of black critical and artistic work from the sea, ocean, water, and ship, to the air, airplanes and airports to reveal how slavery and its technologies intersects with modernity and its technology of travel. I argue that the contemporary literary works of African and diasporic writers at the center of this dissertation, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nnedi Okorafor, complicate the entanglement of flight with possibility, fantasy, lightness, or escape, by showing how the structure and grammar of the slave dungeon and ship haunts the spaces of the air, airplane, and airport. In other words, I utilize an interdisciplinary framework to center blackness in my study to posit that black literary engagements with these sites uncover genealogies and temporalities of flight that undermine the progression-centeredness of travel and mobility. “Dreams of flight” examines this illusive coupling of freedom with flight by focusing on the specific technology and sites of flight (air, airplanes and airports).

Claire Antone Payton

“‘And We Will Be Devoured’: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986).”

I am a Caribbean historian who analyzes urban life to uncover the social, material, political and environmental history of the African Diaspora. I completed my Ph.D. in History at Duke University in 2018. My research, supported in part by a Fulbright-Hayes fellowship, is a history of construction in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that engages urgent questions about the relationship between politics, the built environment, and the historical foundations of disaster.

Two major transformations indelibly marked Haiti in the second half of the twentieth century: explosive urban growth fueled by rural-to-urban migration and the consolidation of state power into the hands of the Duvalier regime, an autocratic nationalist government that ruled between 1957 and 1986. Drawing on extensive archival research, I renarrate the dictatorship through the creation, destruction, and management of material and abstract urban spaces—from airports and aquifers to the political economy of cement. My analysis of these sites shows how the daily politics of authoritarianism were infused with the dynamics of rapid demographic and geographic change. The study brings to light the previously-unknown architects, planners, developers, investors, and local and international officials who enacted, contested, and revised the dictatorship’s ideological visions and pragmatic imperatives.  Ultimately, my research shows how the struggles between dictatorship and democracy in Haiti are deeply tied to neocolonial geographies of power and anxieties about citizenship and belonging in the city.

I have devoted my time at the Woodson to initiating the process of transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript, which I am tentatively calling "And We Will Be Devoured: Construction, Destruction, and Dictatorship in Haiti."

Jermaine Scott

“Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics"

I received my PhD from the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2019. While at the Woodson, I will be working on my manuscript, tentatively titled, “Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics,” which analyzes how black footballers across the African diaspora used football (soccer) as a site of black politics and solidarity. Using two original concepts, namely, black teamwork and the coloniality of sport, I argue that black footballers of the African diaspora unsettled the racial and colonial constitution of modern sport. While the “coloniality of sport” is the establishment of sporting hierarchies that privileges whiteness through the subordination and disciplining of blackness, “black teamwork” consists of the decolonial formations of black sporting subjects (players and administrators) that critique, unsettle, and reveal the coloniality of sport, and football in particular. By interrogating a variety of diasporic spaces during a range of post-colonial contexts—the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in the 1960s, Howard University soccer team in the 1970s, Corinthian Democracy Football Club in 1980s Brazil, and the Dutch National football team during the 1990s—I argue that black populations have used football as a vehicle to make political claims against colonial practices of exclusion, and create fields of diasporic conviviality that exceed the anti-black sensibilities of the nation-state. 

Halimat Somotan

"I am a doctoral candidate in the history department at Columbia University, and my research interests are in the social and urban history of Africa. My dissertation, “‘In the Wider Interests of Nigeria as a Whole’: Lagos and the Making of Federal Nigeria, 1941-76,” examines how working-class and elite residents of Lagos, as well as federal and local bureaucrats, negotiated the transition of Lagos from the colonial capital into the metropolis of independent Nigeria. It investigates how urban dwellers engaged policies such as urban planning and rent control from the late colonial period until the post-independent era. Residents from market women, indigenous groups to tenants, struggled with each other and with town planners, city council workers, and federal politicians to influence the administration of the city. I argue that the competing interests and initiatives of residents and state leaders shaped the implementation and outcomes of policies that satisfied the needs of some people to the detriment of others. For instance, while rent control laws of the 1950s and 1960s endorsed tenants’ advocacy for cheaper rents, the same rules marginalized landlords’ demand for reduced cost of building materials and property taxes. Even though rent control did not curb the soaring prices of rent, it forced landlords and tenants to reinvent different ways to secure housing. By studying the roles of the city dwellers in shaping urban policies, my research departs from the scholarly conclusions that state actors dictated the planning and administration of post-independent Lagos. This project draws from oral interviews, archival resources such as newspapers, petitions, novels, and photographs to illustrate how the actions of multiple people influenced the transformation of the city."