Dr. Bayo Holsey Wins The 2008-2009 Toyin Falola ATWS Africa Book Award

[Toyin Falola]

 

Dr. Bayo Holsey Wins the 2008-2009

Toyin Falola ATWS Africa Book Award

 

Good Greetings USA-Africa Dialogue Family Members:

 

It is with great enthusiasm that I share the wonderful news with you that Dr. Bayo Holsey's book, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana  (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is the winner of this academic year's Toyin Falola Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) Africa Book Award. The US$500 cash award, citation, and elegant plaque will be awarded at the 27th Annual Conference of the ATWS to be convened at the Elmina Beach Resort in Ghana from November 21 to 24, 2009.

 

Indeed, Dr. Holsey's book beat a field of many great books that were submitted for this year's award, and the choice was unanimous as the best book on Africa. The following is sample of excerpts from the judges' commentaries:

 

"The issue of slavery has often been addressed from people outside of Africa. This ethnographic study is as close as we've come to hearing the voices of African peoples on this issue."

 

"Holsey's work fuses historical antecedents and contemporary global relationships to explore the refashioning of the narrative of the slave trade and slavery in Africa in general and Ghana in particular.  The strength of the work lies in Holsey's ability to weave the thematic strands of colonialism, racism, cosmopolitanism and globalization in order to interrogate the sequestering of the slave trade from the local African and Ghanaian discourses as well as the renewed clamor for resituating slavery in the proper historical context.  Holsey's anthropological investigation shows how the public and the private discourse on slavery conspire to fashion slavery along Eurocentric perspectives on the one hand, and inspire a concerted effort for an Afrocentric interpretation.  The work is a brilliant re-conceptualization of the horrendous trans-Atlantic slave trade."

 

"That the African Renaissance is holding roots is hardly in dispute when one reads the Africancentric exploration of the vexing issue of slavery in Bayo Holsey's effulgent work. The timing of this work and what is taking place at the Mali-South African Timbuktu Project must be the blessings of the Creator and the Afrikan ancestors."

 

Dr. Holsey is a professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. For more on her, please the following URL that will take you to her university home page:  http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/CA/bayo.holsey

 

For more information on the Award and the ATWS, the only scholarly association with United Nations membership, please click the following URL:  http://itc.gsw.edu/atws/

 

In Peace Always,

Karim/.

Karim's URL:

http://www.studentservicesdr.org/Promocion/Bangura%20Brief%20Bio%20For%20Howard%20University.pdf

 

th...@earthlink.net

EarthLink Revolves Around You.

 

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa

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