The Afterlife of Negritude and Black Lives Matter with Baba Badji
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Baba Badji, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Racial Justice and a postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, led a discussion of his journey as a child from Senegal to the United States, which has informed both his creative and scholarly work. Baba read from his book of poems, Ghost Letters,which was recently longlisted for a 2021 National Book Award for Poetry. Ghost Letters uses the memory of his own mother, lost when he was six, to inform the story of his early life in Senegal and his Black and American identity. Baba introduced the audience to his scholarship, a new understanding of Negritude that allows for a recognition of the dissimilarities of peoples, cultures, and systems of colonization within Africa, rather than framing the continent as one unified place.
