CBH Talk | Africa Reframed: Rethinking a Continent’s History (with BAM DanceAfrica 2026)

This program is presented in partnership with BAM as part of DanceAfrica 2026. As DanceAfrica celebrates the vitality of African and diasporic cultures, the Center for Brooklyn History presents an event that asks a different set of questions: How has Africa’s history been told, and by whom?

Join CBH as we spotlight the continent in a conversation that confronts historical distortions, rethinks inherited assumptions, celebrates ground-breaking intellectual contributions, and repositions Africa not as peripheral but as central to the story of the modern world. 

Acclaimed journalist and author Howard W. French draws on the revisionist arguments of his book Born in Blackness, which repositions Africa at the center of the modern world’s formation. Yale professor Dan Magaziner reflects on Africa as a center of intellectual production, in particular new thinking about nationhood and independence. In dialogue with Lovia Gyarkye, editor at Hammer & Hope and a leading voice on Black culture and politics, they will explore the continent’s foundational role in the rise of the modern global economy and contemporary political and intellectual thought, the ways that role has been obscured, and how revisiting that history challenges long-standing Eurocentric perspectives.

Offering a critical lens in advance of BAM’s weekend of celebration, this Center for Brooklyn History program invites audiences to engage more deeply with Africa’s past and present, expanding the context for the celebrations unfolding across Brooklyn, and offering a fuller understanding of the forces that have shaped our world.

About DanceAfrica

DanceAfrica is BAM’s (Brooklyn Academy of Music) longest-running program and the nation’s largest festival of African and diasporic dance, music, and culture, bringing together artists, audiences, and communities in Brooklyn every Memorial Day weekend for nearly five decades.

Participants

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. He is the author of six books including Born in Blackness (named a book of the year by the Financial Times and by Amazon, and winner of the 2022 MAAH Stone Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award), and his most recent The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Prize and the Biographers International Plutarch Award). French is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a global affairs columnist at Foreign Policy, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Lovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Dissent, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a contributing editor to Africa is a Country and teaches in the arts and culture program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.  

Dan Magaziner is a historian of 20^th century Africa. He is the author of three books: The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968 – 1977, The Art of Life in South Africa, and Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle to Change South Africa. A specialist in intellectual and cultural history, he teaches 19^th and 20^th century African and South African history; the history of the African diaspora; global and comparative international history. He served as editor for Journal of African History and the Ohio Short Histories of Africa, as well as the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of South African History. Among his next book projects is One, Out of Many: A History of a South African Idea, which considers how South African and other thinkers from the Global South theorized non-racial and non-nationalist approaches to national identity.