Prof. Fanon Che Wilkins

E-Mail: fanonche@gmail.com

EDUCATION
Ph.D., New York University, 2001
M. A., Syracuse University, 1995
B. A., Morehouse College, 1987

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“Perfect For The Poor Man”: Hip-Hop Music, Asian Martial Arts, and the Popular Imagination of the Dispossessed” (Poshek Fu ed., Shaw Brothers Cinema and Pan Asian Globalism (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming Fall 2007)
The Making of Black Internationalist: The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Africa, 1960-1974” (forthcoming Journal of African American History Fall 2007)
“Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950-1965,” Radical History Review, 95 Spring 2006.
"Which Way for Africans in the United States? The Seventh Pan-African Congress And Beyond", African Journal of Political Science/Revue Africaine de Science Politique, v. 1, 1 June 1996

RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research and scholarship are broadly concerned with the international character of the African American experience during the post-World War II period. I specialize in the study of black radical social movement activity in the modern African diaspora. My work intersects the historiographies of the Civil Rights/Black Power movement in the United States and movements for decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean from roughly 1955 to 1975. My interest in the shared history of black radicalism in each of these locales has been shaped by the interdisciplinary approaches of Ethnic and Area Studies, which has been on the cutting edge in exploring the global contours of the Black Radical Tradition. Thus, my research is firmly rooted in theories and methods common in history and African American and African Studies.

I am currently completing a book manuscript titled: Searching for Black Power: African Americans and Africa, 1957-1980. Searching for Black Power focuses on a major, yet neglected dimension of the Civil Rights/Black Power movement of the 1960s, namely the history of solidarity with liberation movements, peoples and states on the African continent and elsewhere in the diaspora. I argue that African American radical activists took a strong interest in decolonization in Africa during the late 1950s and early 1960s and measured black racial advancement against African decolonization processes. African independence movements served as a critical source of inspiration during the early years of the Black Freedom Movement. Yet, growing opposition to the Vietnam War, coupled with the ongoing lure of Third World liberation movements during the Black Power phase (1966-75) of the movement, created a climate of internationalism that embraced political initiatives seeking to define and realize Black Power in Africa and the Caribbean and to a lesser extent, Europe, South America, and Canada. During the 1970s and ‘80s, the solidarity activity that grew out of the struggle to obtain Black Power globally cohered around material and political support for African liberation movements in the white settler-states of southern Africa and the Portuguese colonies.

My second project will be an extension of my strong interest in black radicalism and black cultural production through an investigation of how hip-hop music and culture has played a critical role in the creation of historical memory for a generation of black and brown youth born roughly between 1965 and 1980. Recognizing the absence of a movement that compared in scale and in scope to the modern Civil Rights/Black Power struggle in the 1980s and 90s, I will argue that hip-hop artists, through their work, attempted to imagine and reconstruct the history of the Black Freedom Movement (and other movements of black insurgency) through a variety of references and representations of iconic figures and historical events, facts, and myths. Drawing on the theories and methods concerned with the creation of historical memory, I am interested in the cultural production of hip-hop—what this genre can tell us about the construction of historical meaning. In an attempt to bring historical investigation to bear on contemporary debates about youth, popular culture, “political apathy”, and “social alienation,” this study will attempt to use hip-hop as a lens for understanding how the construction of a usable past—no matter how mythic—deepens our understanding of the hip-hop generation.

Personal Interests
I am an avid snowboarder and lover of the outdoors. I am also a DJ and serious Hip-Hop head who spends a lot of time searching for music and arguing with friends about what’s dope and what’s not.

Courses
The African Diaspora
The Sixties and World Revolution
Black Expressive Culture and Politics in the Modern World
Research Seminar