This piece on Manthia Diawara is a brief biographical sketch.
I make no claims for the completeness or exhuastiveness of this
sketch. This brief essay is simply designed as a point of entry
into Diawara's rich body of work.
Manthia Diawara is presently chair of the Africana Studies Department
at New York University.
Prof. Diawara received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1985.
His dissertation, on the politics and aesthetics of African cinema,
formed the basis for African Cinema, published in 1985
by Indiana University Press. Since then, Dr. Diawara has edited
the volume Black American Cinema, published by Routledge
in 1993 in addition to publishing widely in journals.
Manthia Diawara is one of a growing number of black intellectuals
engaging with strands of the discourse of Black cultural studies,a
project begun in Britain in the early '80s by figures such as
Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. However, Diawara is interested in
fashioning a brand of Black Cultural Studies which takes into
account the material conditions of Black people in the Americas
in order not to replicate the British formulations. His position
on these matters can be found in the piece "Black Studies
/ Cultural Studies: Performative Acts" in AfterImage.
This and other pieces are detailed in the accompanying bibliography.
Diawara is interested in the "unfinished business of black
modernity" and the ways in which African diasporic cultural
production confuses the simple periodization of modernity and
post-modernity. Diawara looks at the ways in which Black cultural
forms produced in "modernity" pre-figured much of what
now gets called "post-modern".
Diawara is interested in the revival of the study of "Blackness",
the re-thinking of the paradigms around the project of Black Studies,
and its centrality in the discourse of cultural studies. However,
Diawara's formulations regarding Blackness put him squarely in
the field of the "strategic essentialists" (to borrow
a phrase from Gayatri Spivak). Thinkers from this school (who
include Arthur Jafa, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose and others) are concerned
with privileging Blackness in all its forms and doing away with
reductive, monlithic conceptions of Black culture. Diawara's thinking
in this area relates strongly to the work of Paul Gilroy and Houston
A. Baker, Jr. who are concerned with Black modernities. The "strategic
essentialist" position retains a strong interest in the hidden
histories and continuities in Black cultural production without
recourse to narrower, pathological and biological notions of cultural
purity.
The growing discourse of Black film has been broadened by Diawara's
work, particularly in his thinking around questions of Black spectatorship
in relation to traditional Hollywood spatial paradigms. His pathbreaking
essays on contemporary Black film, including pieces of Bill Gunn's
Ganja and Hess have contributed much to the expanding body
of work on Black film. Diawara has done pathbreaking work on contemporary
Black American Cinema, particularly in his essay Noirs by Noirs:
Towards A New Realism in Black Cinema, published in African
American Review in 1993.
Diawara's intellectual work represents a significant intervention
into the discourse of both cultural studies, Black Studies and
their complex relationship.
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