AFAS scholars and artists persuasively illustrate the development of various black cultural traditions around the world that may have their roots Africa but are forged under globally diverse local conditions. Moreover, our work is translational and clearly demonstrates why such scholarship is relevant not only to people of African descent but also to people of diverse cultures and backgrounds, in the United States and around the world.

The AFAS program continues to build on more than four decades of intellectually rigorous, culturally responsive, and socially relevant scholarship and activities to provide leadership across the various academic and professional units in Arts & Sciences and the University and, in collaboration with these units, to solve pressing social problems in the St. Louis metropolitan region, across the nation, and around the world. The program also continues to build around its longstanding creative and aesthetic tradition by focusing on black experiences to illuminate, to borrow from Maya Angelou, the human condition. In doing so, the program produces students and scholarship that contribute to culture and society enriched and expanded meanings of what it means to be beautiful, moral, and just and to live, love, and flourish.

Garrett Albert Duncan
Director, Program in African & African American Studies