Kwasi Konadu is an author, scholar, educator, writer, editor, and historian.
Biography
Kwasi Konadu is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor at Colgate University, where he teaches courses in African history and on worldwide African histories and cultures. With extensive archival and field research in West Africa, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, his writings focus on African and African diasporic histories, as well as major themes in world history. He is the author of Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation, The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Transatlantic Africa, 1440-1888, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas, among other books. A father and husband first and foremost, Konadu is also a healer who studied with his grandfather in Jamaica and then in Takyiman as well as a publisher of scholarly books about African world histories and cultures through Diasporic Africa Press. His life work is devoted to knowledge production and the worldwide communities and struggles of peoples of African ancestry.
Books
2019 - Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation
2018 - Akan Pioneers: African Histories, Diasporic Experiences
2016 - The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics Feb 3, 2016 by Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell. In this book Kwasi and Campbell cover 500 years of Ghana's history. The book provides many perspectives about Ghana; historical, political, and cultural. The book discusses the Asante Kingdom, and its relationship to European commerce and the transatlantic slave trade. The reader has selections from farmers, traders, clergy, intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers. His source material comes from historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction. It conveys Ghana's intersecting histories, its contribution to the African Diaspora, its development as a nation, democracy and its significance in the twenty-first century. Duke University Press
2015 - Akan Peoples: In Africa and the Diaspora - A Historical Reader. This book is a collection of essays about the Akan people of West Africa. They are an ethnic group that exist in West Africa and the Africa Diaspora. The collection of essays are about their, history, culture, in Africa, and their presence among the African Diaspora. Markus Wiener Publishers
2014 - Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888. In this book Kwasi gives an African-centric interpretation of the Atlantic slave trade. The source material he uses comes from oral histories and traditions, and written documents. He examines African societies and their viewpoint. Oxford University Press
2013 - The Akan People: A Documentary History Markus Wiener Publishers
2010 - The Akan Diaspora in the Americas Oxford University Press Kwasi documents and demonstrates contributions of the Akan cultural group from West Africa. He examines their experiences in Guyana, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and in North America.
2009 - View From The East: Black Cultural Nationalism and Education in New York City, Second Edition. Syracuse University Press. The East was a cultural and educational center for people of African descent. It was founded by African American educators and progressive activists during the Black Power Movement. The organization was based in Brooklyn, but its influence was throughout New York City, the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This edition expands research using additional archival information from the first edition.
2007 - Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society A study of indigenous medical knowledge systems in Africa and the African Diaspora. Routledge
2004 - Truth Crushed to the Earth Will Rise Again!. The East Organization and the Principles and Practice of Nationalist Development
