“Between African and African American Studies and Me”

Many people didn’t know that before I started writing books about Haiti, African and African American literatures and African and African American intellectual thoughts were my areas of focus. In fact, the topic of my PhD dissertation was on Négritude and Harlem Renaissance. I even published a book on Africa’s greatest living playwright and literary giant: Wole Soyinka (See my book “Radical Humanism and Generous Tolerance: Soyinka on Religion and Human Solidarity,” 2016) and taught a class on the work of Africa’s greatest novelist Chinua Achebe.

Further, I served as the guest editor for the Journal of Pan African Studies for a special issue on Wole Soyinka (Vol. 8, Number 5, September 2015). My second book was about Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes and their ideas about the meaning of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in the world (See my book, “Haitian Modernity and Liberative Interruptions,” 2013).

In 2020, I decided to return to African American religious thought and published a book (“Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology”) in which I studied the theological ideas of James H. Cone and Benjamin E. Mays.  If the good Lord grants me enough grace, I would like to write a book on the religious ideas of Chinua Achebe based on his novels, and an intellectual biography on James H. Cone. Before I do so, I owe Haitian scholars and studies two more books that I must finish by summer 2025. 😊