FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 8, 2005
Dr. Shonekan is available for interviews.
The Columbia College Department of Liberal Education will introduce a Black World Studies minor this fall. The field of study is a comparative analysis of the artistic and political legacies of black peoples around the world and seeks to launch a serious dialog to determine the regional and cultural differences between black peoples. While the field of "blackness" in higher education has traditionally been about race in a post civil rights America, Black World Studies takes a global approach.
One of the characteristics of Columbia's Black World Studies program that sets it apart from similar programs at other institutions is the required course, "Artistic/Political/Intellectual Activist Workshop." In developing the minor, Dr. Stephanie Shonekan felt this capstone experience was essential asking, "Can one even begin to speak about a 'Black World' without also speaking about the nature of activism?"
"We also want to encourage students to question the very notion of 'blackness' by looking at 'blackness' as a problematic identity construct, a political signifier and a metaphor for social marginalization," explains Shonekan, who will serve as coordinator for the new minor.
"Black World Studies will provide our arts and media students with a supplemental area of concentration offering context and background to their various areas of study. Part of Columbia's mission is to send students out to 'author the culture of their times' and 'create change.' This minor will help ensure that those students whose art and work touches on any aspect of black world studies will be well equipped to contextualize their works so that their cultural product will be substantive, complex and accessible."
Stephanie Shonekan, Ph.D., has an intertwined heritage of Nigerian and Trinidadian. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in Nigeria from the University of Jos and the University of Ibadan where she examined the connections between African American poetry and music, focusing on a comparative analysis of Langston Hughes and Louis Armstrong and LeRoi Jones and Miles Davis.
After working at Arthur Anderson's Lagos Office for five years, Shonekan was accepted into the Ph.D. program at Indiana University, Bloomington where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Camilla Williams a lyric soprano who, in 1946, was the first African American to receive a regular contract with a major American opera company. The dissertation treated issues of voice and identity.
At Columbia, Shonekan teaches classes that focus on the art and literature created by people of African descent. Her courses include Black Arts Movement, Harlem Renaissance: 1920s Art and Literature and Contemporary Africa: Life, Literature and Music, and Hip Hop: Global Music and Culture. Shonekan's current inquiry is, "Black Women in Love: Self, Song, Story: A Global Examination of the Love Lives of Black Women," as well as continued research into Nigerian Hip Hop.