Contact Information
Biography Information
Linda M. Heywood is a Professor of African American Studies and of History at Boston University. She is formerly a Whiting Fellow at Columbia University as well as Professor of History at Howard University and Cleveland State University. Her most recent book, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660, was co-authored with Professor John K. Thornton of Boston University and published in September 2007 by Cambridge University Press. She is also the author of Contested Power in Angola (1999) and editor of Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2001). Professor Heywood has published in the Journal of African History, Journal of Modern African Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Slavery and Abolition.
Project Description
This project examines the historical Njinga and the Njinga of memory and nation building as a way of exploring how the past informed and continues to affect contemporary Africans and Africans in the American Diaspora. Queen Njinga was not only a powerful and controversial leader of the 17th century Ndongo kingdom in Angola, but also became a subject of memory in Angola and Brazil. Today she is becoming a symbol of nation-building in Angola. The study will rely on an extensive range of primary published and unpublished sources as well as interviews with Angolans to investigate how Njinga became a subject of memory and nation-building. The work is innovative in that it will combine historical investigation and ideas from the field of history and memory to explore the life and legacy of this important pre-colonial African leader.
|
Linda Heywood in the L.A. Times
|
