Diawara, Manthia, 1953-

Founded in 1969, the Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University’s mission is to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic world and beyond with a commitment to the study of Blacks in modernity through concentrations in Pan-Africanism and Black Urban Studies. The Records of the Institute of African American Affairs date from 1963 to the early 2000s. Included in these records are conference and event materials in paper and computer files, and audiovisual recordings of these events. Events with a significant amount of material in the collection include the Black Male Conference; Black Theater Forum; the Artists and Scholars-in-Residence program; Black Genius; the Yari Yari conference for Black women writers; and the Slave Routes: The Long Memory Symposium. These records also contain material related to the files of various IAAA Directors, including Founding Director Roscoe C. Brown Jr., Edward M. Carroll, Earl S. Davis, and Manthia Diawara. Files related to the Association of Education in Journalism internship program, which was co-founded by Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr. can also be found in this collection. Audio recordings of the radio talk shows The Soul of Reason from the 1970s and The Urban League Presents from the 1960s, as well as May 1965 recordings of an NYU Teach-In, which was organized in protest of the Vietnam War are in this collection.

Diawara was born in Bamako, Mali, and received his early education in France.[1] He later received a PhD from Indiana University in 1985. Prior to teaching at NYU, Diawara taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Much of his research has been in the field of black cultural studies, though his work has differed from the traditional approach to such study formulated in Britain in the early 1980s. Along with other notable recent scholars, Diawara has sought to incorporate consideration of the material conditions of African Americans to provide a broader context for the study of African diasporic culture. An aspect of this formulation has been the privileging of "Blackness" in all its possible forms rather than as relevant to a single, perhaps monolithic definition of black culture.[2]

Diawara has contributed significantly to the study of black film. In 1992, Indiana University Press published his African Cinema: Politics & Culture and in 1993, Routledge published a volume he edited entitled Black-American Cinema. A filmmaker himself, Diawara has written and directed a number of films.[3]

His 1998 book In Search of Africa is an account of his return to his childhood home of Guinea and was published by Harvard University Press.[4]

Diawara is the editor-in-chief of Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture, and politics dedicated to work that engages contemporary Black concerns. He serves on the advisory board of October, and is also on the editorial collective of Public Culture.[5]

In 2003, Diawara released We Won't Budge: A Malaria Memoir, the title a tribute to Salif Keita's anthemic protest song "Nou Pas Bouger".[6] The book was described by The Village Voice as "by turns elegiac, unsentimental, angry, and wise....his story unfolds in the triumphant days post-1960 (when Mali gained independence from France), trips into reverie for a youth spent in thrall to rock and roll, and evokes his awakenings to art and racism in the West."[7]

Diawara serves on the board of TransAfrica Forum, alongside Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Walter Mosely, which supported Barack Obama's successful candidacy for President in 2008.[8]

In 2015, he was featured in the documentary Sembene![9] on the life and career of legendary Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, a filmmaker Diawara himself profiled in his own documentary on the filmmaker, Sembene: the Making of African Cinema.