Preparations for a communal meal served to participants in the Senegal faculty seminar. Photo courtesy Mbye Cham. In this essay, De Anna Reese, a 2019 participant in CAORC’s faculty development seminar to Senegal, discusses West Africa’s rich communal traditions of shared food, music, and dance and how they resonate with the strong family traditions of African-American communities. As one who teaches and studies one of the strongest and most enduring institutions in the Black

A traditional Senegalese music performance enjoyed at WARC during the 2019 faculty development seminar. Photo courtesy the author. In this essay, Errol Montes-Pizarro, a 2019 participant in CAORC’s faculty development seminar to Senegal and a mathematics professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey, discusses his ongoing research into historical and contemporary trends within Senegalese music and how West African musical traditions can be used to bridge geographic and cu

American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellow and graduate student at the University of Chicago Rehanna Kheshgi has been studying Bihu music – a formerly stigmatized rural music genre, now becoming popular via mass media. This spring Ms. Kheshgi was invited to perform with a musician who is the son of Khagen Mahanta, the "King of Bihu," on his April/May 2015 tour of Assam, India. She learned a great deal about language politics and about the stakes of performing traditio