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.