Talk Title: Watch While You Weep: Bearing Witness to Black Diasporic Friendships

Talk Description: Across the twentieth century, and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, Black writers committed themselves to crafting depictions of friendship alongside calls for global Black solidarity as part of decolonial efforts. This talk explores how witnessing established the historical record of friendship between Ghanaian playwright Efua Theodora Sutherland and American writer Maya Angelou. Together in Ghana, between 1962-1965, Sutherland and Angelou critiqued dominant modes of history and situated their work in the everyday lived practices of pan-Africanism. With close readings of Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Dr. Adomako contextualizes the enduring friendship between Sutherland and Angelou, revealing how protocols of Black friendship include bearing witness to the tensions produced in diasporic exchange.
 

Bio:

Dr. Andrea Y. Adomako is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at New York University as well as a Research Associate in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (WITS). A Barnard College Mellon Mays Fellow, class of 2015, Dr. Adomako received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University. Her manuscript, Black Star Friendships: Literatures and Letters from the Pan-African Moment asks how Black writers use friendship to question and rework theories of relationality. Concentrating on the creative production, exchange, and connection between Ghanaians and Black Americans, Dr. Adomako demonstrates how these friendships offer insights into quotidian practices of pan-Africanism, as a continuous, intramural protocol. She examines the works and friendships of Maya Angelou, Efua Sutherland, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ama Ata Aidoo to contextualize how the labor of friendship, in the diasporic Black literary tradition, is a political commitment, an artistic expression, and an intellectual practice. Her research is featured in Feminist Formations, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and Rethinking African Childhoods: An Anthology.