AFAS Featured Event: Works of Dr. Samuel Shearer and Dr. Thembelani Mbatha

Samuel Shearer is assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies. Shearer's work focuses on the design, production, and destruction of urban space in African cities and how these processes inform popular politics and cultures across the continent. His current book project, tentatively titled The Kigali After: A New City for the End of the World is about the politics of urban design, displacement, and the dual crises of capitalism and ecology in one of the fastest urbanizing cities the world: Kigali, Rwanda. Dr. Thembelani (Themba) Mbatha is an interdisciplinary scholar of global black thought and the literary and cultural histories of Africa and the African diaspora. His work focuses on the intersections between the histories of blackness and the politics of memory in the postcolonial and black Atlantic worlds. His current book project, titled Registers of Black Witnessing: Archives of Testimony in Africa and the African Diaspora, sets to offer a decolonized framework of testimony and witnessing while investigating the implications of this on contemporary and future discourses of blackness.