Africa Month: Homecoming

“Homecoming, especially for Africans in the diaspora, asks us to think about homemaking by negotiating history, identity, power and mobility. It is a constant search for stability and meaning in spaces and places shaped by colonial disruptions and global economic inequalities.”

— Kalamazoo College Associate Professor of Anthropology Espelencia Baptiste 

Kalamazoo College will host world-renowned scholars, artists, filmmakers and performers from four continents Thursday, May 14–Saturday, May 16, for its second annual Africa Month. The assemblage will provide a space of conviviality and community for conversations, meals and joyful music at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, 205 Monroe St. 

The events are supported by the Arcus Center, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence grant and the hosting department of African studies, with financial or intellectual contributions from the Center for International Programs, and the departments of philosophy, anthropology-sociology, English and French and Francophone studies.  

Director of African Studies Dominique Somda, Assistant Professor of French Manfa Sanogo, Associate Professor of Anthropology Espelencia Baptiste and Professor of English Babli Sinha are the event’s convenors. 

In 2025, the first edition of Africa Month helped K relaunch its African studies concentration while invited scholars and the community rethought and questioned their knowledge of Africa and from Africa. This year’s edition, themed Homecoming, turns its focus to the category of home and to the mobilities that carry people to and from their homes, across land, time, memory and knowledge. The event offers a space to think through African studies in its broadest sense, embracing Africans and the homes of African descendants alike. 

“Home, in postcolonial thought, is never a stable or innocent place,” Somda said. “It is both a site of return and a terrain of struggle. Homecoming asks what it means to return when histories of colonial violence, displacement and extraction have profoundly transformed the conditions of belonging.” 

Sinha said that the exploration of this theme will take place through a variety of media including art, film, scholarship and music, “reflecting the ethos of the liberal arts as it explores Africanness through many forms of knowledge and expression in dialogue with each other.”  

Sanogo said the continuation of Africa Month helps establish a lasting tradition of K engagement and institutional commitment to centering African and diasporic voices, knowledge, culture and lived experiences. 

“Calling it Homecoming highlights the importance of creating a space where these experiences can circulate across borders and generations,” he said. “We hope this program will resonate both on campus and in the broader Kalamazoo community.” 

Presenters, speakers and panelists will include: 

• Cheikh A. Thiam, professor of English and Black studies, Amherst College 

• Sakiko Nakao, assistant professor of African history and French, University of Tokyo 

• Hilary Jones, director of graduate studies for history, University of Kentucky 

• Alain Kassanda, filmmaker 

• Julia Woods ’20, New York University Ph.D. candidate 

• Brian Klein and Justine Davis, Afro-American and African studies assistant professors, University of Michigan 

• Klara Boyer-Rossol, historian, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement 

• Franck Rakotobe, assistant professor of French at the American University of Paris 

• Erol Josué, a Vodou priest, performer and director general of Haiti’s National Bureau of Ethnology. 

The public is invited and registration is available online. The full schedule of events is available at the African Studies website. A livestream of the events can be watched on Vimeo. 

“This is a new annual rendezvous: a place to learn, think and celebrate in a world where Africa and Africans are too often seen only through the lens of lack,” Somda said. “The event of the year, Homecoming, speaks to experiences we all carry: mobility, nostalgia, the journey away and the journey back.”