Decolonizing Arts-Based Methodologies: Researching the African Diaspora

The genealogy of racism dates back to 610 AD when Islamic jihadists invented whiteness as a religious justification for deracinating and enslaving African people out of East Africa and into Southeastern Europe for more than 1,300 years.

Through a new interdisciplinary research methodology, Ancestorology, a taxonomy of Western cultural and visual productions of history are juxtaposed with the social stratifications of the African Diaspora to arrive at a new interpretation of the historical narrative.

Decolonzing Arts-Based Methodologies: Researching the African Diaspora provokes critical analytical thought between the historical narrative and current public discourse in Western societies where people of African descent exist. The importance of this work begins the process of unlearning Western ways of knowing and seeing through hegemonic productions of knowledge and by assigning new values to humanity’s collective memory.

Paula D. Royster, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar practitioner who has researched the African Diaspora on four continents. She is two-time Fulbright Scholarship grantee and published I.AM.ARAPI.: The Journey of Akan Israelites in the Islamic Slave Trade (The Fairview Agency, 2019).