Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication, in partnership with the Institute of African Studies, the Bachelor of Global and International Studies and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, invites you to attend a talk by Howard W. French on Monday, Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. via Zoom.

This is a Black History Month event.

Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer and the author of five books, including three works of non-fiction, a work of documentary photography and a book from Norton Liveright about Africa and the birth of modernity. He is also a professor of journalism at the Columbia Journalism School.

His most recent work, and the subject of his talk at Carleton, is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. French’s website says that the book “reveals the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity [and] vitally reframes our understanding of world history.”
The history of Africa, French contends, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?

In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Born in Blackness reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent.