Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications by Sureshi M Jayawardene
Journal of Black Studies, 2022
This article is based on a content analysis of eight digital news reports published between June ... more This article is based on a content analysis of eight digital news reports published between June 2020 and March 2021 that link anti-Blackness in South Asia to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter following George Floyd's murder and the heightened global attention to issues of anti-Black racism against African Americans. In this study, I ask the following questions regarding these news reports: (1) How do these accounts present Afrodiasporic communities in South Asia relative to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter? (2) What kind of impact does the use of #BlackLivesMatter to bring attention to South Asia's racism have on Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon African communities? This paper contributes additional interpretive and analytical material to scholarship on racialization in South Asian societies, political intimacies between Afrodiasporic communities in geographically disparate parts of the world, and the need for cultural validity in journalistic accounts engendering #BlackLivesMatter to legitimate the connective tissue of this global Black political movement.
Journal of African American Studies, 2020
In thinking through the meaning of Black Digital Humanities and Africana Studies' futurity among ... more In thinking through the meaning of Black Digital Humanities and Africana Studies' futurity among junior scholars and practitioners, this article presents a meditation on the intersections between Digital Humanities (DH), Africana Studies coursework, and Africana Studies pedagogy. It offers a case study wherein DH was employed in the instruction and assessment activities of an upper division hybrid (i.e., combining traditional face-to-face and online instruction) Africana Studies course at a public university in southern California during the fall semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. The purpose of this experiment was to determine how Africana Studies might go beyond a mere engagement with DH questions, theories, and tools to show how DH coursework that is distinctly "Africana" in nature may be developed more centrally as a subfield of Africana Studies itself. The overarching questions guiding this experiment include the following: What does it mean to engage DH in Africana Studies? How might we teach DH in Africana Studies within the framework of its pedagogical and methodological objectives? How does Africana DH shape both collaborative and creative learning in the classroom?
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2019
Ceylon Africans are an Afrodiasporic community in Sri Lanka and are the descendants of enslaved A... more Ceylon Africans are an Afrodiasporic community in Sri Lanka and are the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the island from the 16th-20th centuries. This article focuses on the deployment of Ceylon African mānja performances as an embodiment of memory and Afrodiasporic identity both in private and public spheres. I argue that Ceylon African mānja performances extend beyond an expression of identity and functions as an Africana aesthetic praxis that facilitates memory-keeping work among African-descended peoples in South Asia. Combining theories of Africana aesthetics, memory, and performance with ethnography, I illustrate how mānja performance is a catalyst for individual and communal African identity. This study reveals how mānja performances are not merely limited to enactments of unique cultural practices for the education or admiration of an audience but also about acknowledging the significance of memory, remembering, and remembering to their life worlds, Africanity, and futurity.
Francis Cress Welsing, a Black psychiatrist and medical school professor, advanced one of the mos... more Francis Cress Welsing, a Black psychiatrist and medical school professor, advanced one of the most notable and controversial theories about the perpetuation of global White supremacy. The cress theory of color confrontation (CTCC) seeks to etiologically explain the varying degrees of White supremacist patterns of behavior that shape White interaction with Black people in particular and " non-White " people in general. White supremacy has been under-theorized in Africana Studies save for a few key scholars. The present investigation seeks to locate the CTCC within Africana Studies in terms of Christian's, McDougal's, Karenga's, and Banks's epistemological models, and to estimate the analytical value it adds to knowledge production in the discipline. This analysis concludes that CTCC both enhances and challenges Africana Studies. It offers a systematic scientific examination of White supremacist behaviors and psychology to equip Africana communities for the continuing needs of the freedom struggle. CTCC also challenges Africana Studies in that in order to move beyond a reactive posture toward racism, it is necessary to direct systematic attention, resources, and research toward studying White thought, in order to understand, anticipate, and defeat its efforts to oppress people of African descent.
Contemporary South Asian sociality is marked by signifiers of race, caste, ethnicity, and coloris... more Contemporary South Asian sociality is marked by signifiers of race, caste, ethnicity, and colorism. Examining the particular social inequalities and marginalization experienced by Africana people in these societies uncovers the dialectical interrelationship between caste, race, and colorism. This yields an understanding of how race and its more trenchant inflection, racism, function in South Asia. Interpreting implications for Africana politics in South Asian societies requires a theorization of these categories. Racialized casteism is an analytic that reveals the relationship between race, caste and colorism in South Asia, and highlights how Africana presence indisputably raises the significance of race thereby intensifying the outcomes faced by Siddis and Kaffirs.
This study locates the scholarship on the Siddis of India and the Kaffirs of Sri Lanka-two Africa... more This study locates the scholarship on the Siddis of India and the Kaffirs of Sri Lanka-two Africana communities in the Indian Ocean. Using Afrocentric theories and concepts, this study interrogates the limitations of extant scholarship on the Siddis and Kaffirs using a content analysis of select scholarly texts. Through this content analysis, the discursive decentralization of the history, culture, perspectives, and experiences of the Siddis and Kaffirs submerged in Eurocentric and multicultural narratives of African presence in India and Sri Lanka is revealed. This study establishes typologies of the dominant discursive approaches that scholars are using to study the Siddis and Kaffirs. In uncovering these typologies, this study emphasizes the importance of a culturally grounded worldview, methodological framework, and scholarly location for the accurate and complete study and theorization about Africana people in the Indian Ocean region.
p by Sureshi M Jayawardene
Francis Cress Welsing, a Black psychiatrist and medical school professor, advanced one of the mos... more Francis Cress Welsing, a Black psychiatrist and medical school professor, advanced one of the most notable and controversial theories about the perpetuation of global White supremacy. The cress theory of color confrontation (CTCC) seeks to etiologically explain the varying degrees of White supremacist patterns of behavior that shape White interaction with Black people in particular and " non-White " people in general. White supremacy has been under-theorized in Africana Studies save for a few key scholars. The present investigation seeks to locate the CTCC within Africana Studies in terms of Christian's, McDougal's, Karenga's, and Banks's epistemological models, and to estimate the analytical value it adds to knowledge production in the discipline. This analysis concludes that CTCC both enhances and challenges Africana Studies. It offers a systematic scientific examination of White supremacist behaviors and psychology to equip Africana communities for the continuing needs of the freedom struggle. CTCC also challenges Africana Studies in that in order to move beyond a reactive posture toward racism, it is necessary to direct systematic attention, resources, and research toward studying White thought, in order to understand, anticipate, and defeat its efforts to oppress people of African descent.
Book Reviews by Sureshi M Jayawardene
Papers by Sureshi M Jayawardene
Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood, 2019
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Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications by Sureshi M Jayawardene
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Book Reviews by Sureshi M Jayawardene
Papers by Sureshi M Jayawardene