Dr Imani Tafari-Ama takes up second Fulbright Scholarship honour
Published:Monday | August 14, 2023 | 12:05 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter
Dr Imani Tafari-Ama, opinion writer for The Gleaner, counts herself lucky to have been selected for a second time to pursue a programme under the United States’ (US) Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Program.
She will teach in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston (UMass Boston) for the upcoming academic year 2023-2024. She was also a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence for the academic year 2017/18 where she went to Bridgewater State University.
Tafari-Ama is a former research fellow at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO) at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, where she applied multidisciplinary skills in this position to manage development projects that addressed problems of gender-based violence, legislative reform, women’s economic empowerment and climate responsiveness and gender justice, among other issues.
During her first Scholar-in-Residence Program, Tafari-Ama taught five courses in the Anthropology Department at Bridgewater State University. These included a study abroad course to Germany where she leveraged the network with which she had engaged as international fellow and curator at the Flensburg Maritime Museum for 18 months between 2018 and 2017, to lead a cross-cultural international seminar including academics, curators, artists and students.
She is now looking forward to going to the University of Massachusetts, Boston, which is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system.
The announcement of Tafari-Ama’s Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Program took place at the US Embassy in Jamaica on July 26.
In an exclusive interview with The Gleaner following the announcement, Tafari-Ama expressed how excited she was to go and do research in the area she loves and appreciates the most, which is anthropology, while teaching.
“I’m very happy ... I’m very honoured to be a double recipient. I wanted it a second time. I wanted that taste of sharing the richness of what we have from the Caribbean with students who see brand Jamaica in a stereotypical way and who don’t know of our cultural history, our contradictions, our strengths, the challenges that we faced from the bottom up,” Tafari-Ama told The Gleaner.
She said she considers her sojourn for the next academic year as an ambassadorial assignment to represent Jamaica.
Representing
“To be in a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence situation, you really are representing not only your country, but your region, your Pan-Africanism in my case, because I am very passionate about that,” she said.
She also shared her appreciation for William J. Fulbright, for whom the programme is named.
“In spite of his creativeness of creating this award in 1946 to assist in global understandings of potentially hostile people, I think that the fact that he, on the ground was not somebody who had resolve the race issue and that race continues to be a divisive issue in North America, I think if I can contribute to discussions about how we can have respect for difference, then that would enable me to make a valuable contribution,” she said.
Tafari-Ama also shared why she applied to the programme again.
“That experience of teaching in a US university was very extraordinary and I actually taught five courses then, including one that I decided to study abroad, so I had been a curator in the year before at the Flemsberg Maritime Museum in Germany and I was able to do an international seminar including the students I was able to teach at Bridgewater and students from Germany at two different universities,” Tafari-Ama told The Gleaner.
“It was a very extraordinary opportunity to put those two worlds together at that moment,” she said.
Decolonising
Tafari-Ama also participated at Flensburg Maritime Museum in Northern Germany to conceptualise the ‘Rum, Sweat and Tears’ exhibition, which was a nine-month installation that succeeded in decolonising the ‘Rum City’ of Flensburg through an ethnographic transatlantic trialogue.
That exhibition provided a critical African Caribbean response to the 2017 centennial of Denmark’s sale of the land and people of the Virgin Islands to the US for $25 million dollars in gold and 69 years Efter emancipation. Her robust response to that contradiction reflects the four decades she has devoted to addressing development problems and solutions.
Tafari-Ama hails from a large family in Albion, Manchester, where she attended Manchester High School before majoring in Communication with Language and Literature at the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at The University of the West Indies, Mona.
She was awarded successive fellowships by the people and government of The Netherlands to pursue Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.
Tafari-Ama is the author of novels and poems, Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line, Up for Air: This Half Has Never Been Told (novel), Lead in the Veins (poetry) and numerous book chapters.
The other individuals from Jamaica to participate in Fulbright programmes this year are Denise Brown and Kamala McWhinney, Fulbright Faculty Development Program; Lerone Laing, Fulbright Foreign Student Program; Nickania Pryce and Dr Paulette Ramsay, Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Program.