Jessica B. Harris and Cecile Emeke Teach Teachers to Teach the Diaspora
“If you look at our role during enslavement, we’re growing the food, processing the food, preparing the food, serving the food.”
Jessica B. Harris
Cecile Emeke
Illuminating the African Diaspora through Culture and the Arts
Culinary historian Jessica B. Harris and filmmaker Cecile Emeke will meet with 100 educators from around the world in New Orleans on October 5th
As part of a celebration of the African Diaspora in New Orleans in early October, culinary historian Jessica B. Harris and filmmaker Cecile Emeke will conduct a workshop with 100 educators on how to use a specially developed Advanced Placement® Seminar to teach the Diaspora to students.
The African Diaspora Content was developed by the African Diaspora Consortium (ADC) to be incorporated in AP® Seminar. The three-day gathering is co-hosted with the College Board, and features Harris and Emeke.
The festivities in New Orleans will also include a “jazz conversation” about the Diaspora between the trombonist and composer Delfeayo Marsalis and special guest, actress and art collector CCH Pounder.
The workshops on teaching the Diaspora, featuring Jessica B. Harris and Cecile Emeke, will be held in New Orleans’ historic Gallier Hall on Saturday, October 5th from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The workshops are open to the media. Press Contact: Conan N. Louis, 202-494-0324 clouis@adcexchange.org
The Advanced Placement® Seminar anchoring the workshop is the first devoted to a part of global history obscured by the Euro-centric worldview of most textbooks. The College Board’s first AP® course with an Africa topic, it was made available to all schools nationwide in 2020 and has since gained national media attention.
Kassie Freeman, ADC Founding President, calls Harris and Emeke “iconic figures in contemporary Black culture who bring unique perspectives to the teaching of the Diaspora.”
Harris, whose book High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America became a four-part Netflix series, will discuss food as “the lingua franca with which we talk to each other and about ourselves.” In her African travels, Harris, recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, has frequently tasted “things that reminded me of home,” informing her understanding of African cuisine as “foundational to the cooking of this country” and a lens for equity: “If you look at our role during enslavement, we’re growing the food, processing the food, preparing the food, serving the food.”
As the creator of works such as the globally acclaimed documentary series “Strolling,” which recorded conversations with people across the Black Diaspora, Emeke, a London-based filmmaker, writer and artist, will bring an immediacy to a topic that is too often view as ancient history. Her work, which has appeared on HBO, the BBC and Sky, often explores time, cosmology and cultural production, through the prism of the black diasporic experience, within liminal spaces and intimate settings. Emeke also has received film and moving image commissions from Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dazed Space, and other leading arts venues.
Also attending the teacher workshop will be Dr. Errick Greene, Superintendent of the Jackson, Mississippi Public Schools (JPS). The Jackson school district is ADC’s official partner in assisting ADC in refining and growing the number of schools offering African Diaspora Content, enhancing the curriculum to stimulate learning outcomes, and excite and amplify student voices and experiences globally. Superintendent Greene had this to say about the JPS partnership with ADC: “We truly appreciate being recognized as a partner with ADC. We celebrate ADC’s vision and goals to preserve and promote the shared heritage and history across the African Diaspora.”
The African Diaspora Consortium (ADC) educates the world about the resilience among diaspora populations, their contributions to cultures around the globe, and the connections they share across time and distance. “The diaspora is a story so central to an understanding of history, cultures, and human experiences that it just has to be examined and told,” says Freeman, an internationally acclaimed scholar on the diaspora and comparative/international issues in higher education. “Our efforts are guided by the African proverb that ‘until the lion learns to speak, the tales of the hunt will always favor the hunter.”