GROUND ZERO: HOW IT ALL BEGAN – a conversation with Dr. Sylviane Diouf

A conversation about the events that preceded the colonial project, the complex and diverse historical context for the Transatlantic slave trade and reparations being paid to descendants of Africans enslaved in the Americas.

Dr. Sylviane Diouf, an award-winning social historian of the African Diaspora. She is a Visiting Scholar at Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. She has curated twelve exhibitions and authored and edited thirteen books.  A social historian, Dr. Diouf focuses on uncovering essential stories and topics that were overlooked or negated, but which offer new insights into the African Diaspora. She has a special interest in the experience of the Africans deported, through the international slave trades, to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, including the particular experience of African Muslims. Diouf is the author of the acclaimed Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. She won several prizes for Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America; and is the author, more recently, of Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons.  A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, Diouf has appeared in several documentaries and gave a keynote speech to the UN General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She was the inaugural director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library.