CBH Talk | Africa Reframed: Rethinking a Continent’s History

This program is presented in partnership with BAM as part of DanceAfrica 2026. As DanceAfrica celebrates the vitality of African and diasporic cultures, the Center for Brooklyn History presents an event that asks a different set of questions: How has Africa’s history been told, and by whom?

Join CBH as they spotlight the continent in a conversation that confronts historical distortions, rethinks inherited assumptions, celebrates ground-breaking intellectual contributions, and repositions Africa not as peripheral but as central to the story of the modern world.

Acclaimed journalist and author Howard W. French draws on the revisionist arguments of his book Born in Blackness, which repositions Africa at the center of the modern world’s formation. Yale professor Dan Magaziner reflects on Africa as a center of intellectual production, in particular new thinking about nationhood and independence. In dialogue with Lovia Gyarkye, editor at Hammer & Hope and a leading voice on Black culture and politics, they will explore the continent’s foundational role in the rise of the modern global economy and contemporary political and intellectual thought, the ways that role has been obscured, and how revisiting that history challenges long-standing Eurocentric perspectives.

Offering a critical lens in advance of BAM’s weekend of celebration, this Center for Brooklyn History program invites audiences to engage more deeply with Africa’s past and present, expanding the context for the celebrations unfolding across Brooklyn, and offering a fuller understanding of the forces that have shaped our world.

About DanceAfrica

DanceAfrica is BAM’s (Brooklyn Academy of Music) longest-running program and the nation’s largest festival of African and diasporic dance, music, and culture, bringing together artists, audiences, and communities in Brooklyn every Memorial Day weekend for nearly five decades.