Christel N Temple
University of Pittsburgh, Africana Studies, Faculty Member
- Dr. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with affiliate status with Gender, Sexual... moreDr. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with affiliate status with Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS). She holds the Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and an M.A. in Comparative Black Literature (a track of African American Studies) from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She taught in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) from 1999-2010 (also as affiliate and core faculty, respectively, with Gender and Women's Studies and with the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program) and in the Department of History and Political Science at The College of Saint Rose from 1996-1999. Dr. Temple is the author of LITERARY PAN-AFRICANISM: HISTORY, CONTEXTS, AND CRITICISM (2005), LITERARY SPACES: INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE BLACK LITERATURE (2007), TRANSCENDENCE AND THE AFRICANA LITERARY ENTERPRISE (2017), and BLACK CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY (2020). Her work reflects the innovation of the professionally-trained Africologist (a degree holder directly in the discipline Africana Studies). Her research areas includes cultural memory and mythology, studies on contemporary post-racial/post-cultural discourses, theorizing Diaspora Sankofa usage, updating the hero dynamics of Malcolm X, and literary history and criticism. Her work appears in numerous edited collections and in journals such as JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, WESTERN JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES , INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES, AFRICANA STUDIES: A SERIAL, AND AFRICALOGICAL PERSPECTIVES. Her reviews appear in JOURNAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES, SAGE, CLA JOURNAL, NATIONS & NATIONALISM, AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY, and BULLETIN OF THE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION.
Dr. Temple is a former Executive Director of the Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference and an active participant with the AfroEurope@ns: Cultures and Identities group. She has also served in Student Affairs as Special Assistant for Diversity and Social Justice and as Interim/Assistant Director of the Women's Center (UMBC).
For full list of publications see link below to google scholar.edit
This chapter critically meanders through sports biographies and academic research on Muhammad Ali to ascertain, in terms of the critical paradigm of Black cultural mythology, precisely what is the mythological structure of Ali's legacy... more
This chapter critically meanders through sports biographies and academic research on Muhammad Ali to ascertain, in terms of the critical paradigm of Black cultural mythology, precisely what is the mythological structure of Ali's legacy that we should be transmitting to future generations. This essay is innovative in terms of the specificity it demands to understand Ali's legacy, and mythological and memorial value in terms of lessons and reproducible/inspirational value for the culture's survival. This essay also challenges the usual and customary presentation of Ali as "An American Hero" and reframes Ali as "An Africana Hero" with grounding and contextualization ideal for an Africana Studies engagement with sports history, biography, and cultural memory.
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By challenging the bland language of the question, "What can I do with a degree in Africana Studies," this essay teaches students in Africana Studies how to articulate their training as master communicators with a high cultural competency... more
By challenging the bland language of the question, "What can I do with a degree in Africana Studies," this essay teaches students in Africana Studies how to articulate their training as master communicators with a high cultural competency on the job market--in terms of "value added" dimensions, which is language the contemporary employment market understands. This is an original essay that surveys Fortune 500 companies' articulated needs for global and cultural expertise and highlights the descriptive language and knowledge categories of the discipline that students should be learning in Introduction to Africana Studies and in Senior Seminars to confidently describe their training in the discipline in terms of its "market value." It also links the confidence of articulating market value to broader university expectations of and objectives for "speaking in the disciplines," which has not been well-addressed in scholarship on the discipline of Africana Studies.
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This study is an evaluation how central texts and definitive anthologies in the three fields of (1) Africana Studies, (2) African American History, and (3) African American Literary Studies have approached the year 1619. It excavates each... more
This study is an evaluation how central texts and definitive anthologies in the three fields of (1) Africana Studies, (2) African American History, and (3) African American Literary Studies have approached the year 1619. It excavates each discipline's or field's orientation to the origins of African experience in the English colony of Virginia as a narrative of Africana Cultural Memory Studies.
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There are three key defining, theoretical works on literary Pan-Africanism that have influenced the ideas of the nearly two dozen scholars who also address literary Pan-Africanism in their research--(1) historian Robert A. Hill's... more
There are three key defining, theoretical works on literary Pan-Africanism that have influenced the ideas of the nearly two dozen scholars who also address literary Pan-Africanism in their research--(1) historian Robert A. Hill's introductory essay on George Samuel Schuyler's Ethiopian Stories that briefly credits the Harlem Renaissance's internationalism for the phenomenon, (2) my own monograph that considers literary Pan-Africanism as a reflection of an exchange of cultural worldviews and migration/travel that instigates Pan-Africanist ideals and African American characterizations in the literature of four key West African writers, and (3) literary critic Anne V. Adams's essay which uses the possibilities found in literature's account of multidirectional migrations between Africa and the Diaspora to deescalate the confrontation and critical debates among Diaspora theorists with distinct assumptions about the norms of Diasporan experience. This comprehensive history introduces the handbook's section on Literary Pan-Africanism.
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Studies of transnational Afro-German heritage have overlooked the possibility that an Afro-German from the post-WWII period has been raised in the U.S. with a German birth mother. This chapter explores the critical contexts of... more
Studies of transnational Afro-German heritage have overlooked the possibility that an Afro-German from the post-WWII period has been raised in the U.S. with a German birth mother. This chapter explores the critical contexts of transnational Afroeuropean and Afro-German identity and then relies on autoethnographic methodology to explore a German/Afro-German family's legacy from Europe to the U.S. and, culturally speaking, beyond these identities.
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This chapter explores the intricate dimensions of the literary enterprise within Africana Studies including the domain, assumptions, expectations, and priorities of transmitting literary knowledge within the Africana Studies (not English... more
This chapter explores the intricate dimensions of the literary enterprise within Africana Studies including the domain, assumptions, expectations, and priorities of transmitting literary knowledge within the Africana Studies (not English Department) curriculum.
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I share several of the concepts of Black Cultural Mythology related to my new book, Black Cultural Mythology (2020)
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from the International Journal of Africana Studies
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This essay introduces the Demographic Literary Standard (DLS) as a social science-oriented tool of literary criticism. The essay considers all ten plays of August Wilson's Century Cycle and Suzan-Lori Park's volume 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS.
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This critical essay appears in the journal AFRICALOGICAL PERSPECTIVES and is a critical evaluation of the structure of the Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference. Co-authored with Bayyinah S. Jeffries.
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The chapter considers "the return" in a contemporary globalist context in which Africans in the Diaspora expand the geography of return, conceptualized as a contemporary manifestation of the Adinkra communicator Sankofa.
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This is a chapter from the collection ESSAYS IN HONOR OF AN INTELLECTUAL WARRIOR, MOLEFI KETE ASANTE edited by Ama Mazama. The essay introduces my new cultural theory of Black Cultural Mythology and pays homage to Asante's... more
This is a chapter from the collection ESSAYS IN HONOR OF AN INTELLECTUAL WARRIOR, MOLEFI KETE ASANTE edited by Ama Mazama. The essay introduces my new cultural theory of Black Cultural Mythology and pays homage to Asante's pre-Afrocentricity work on African American myth.
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This is a classical comparative literary study of the poetry of three Africana writers from the US, Haiti, and Cuba.
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A chapter from the volume MALCOLM X: AN HISTORICAL READER edited by James L. Conyers, Jr. and Andrew P. Smallwood. The chapter considers Malcolm X's legacy in light of adapted practices of the West African funeral dirge tradition.
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A chapter in AFRICANA ISLAMIC STUDIES (2016) that surveys Islam as a cultural context in Africana Literatures.
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... With an aggressive news media and communication abilities enabled by modern digital and Internet technology, these two speeches have summoned ... View all references) that infuses Black hero dynamics, legacy practices, heritage tools,... more
... With an aggressive news media and communication abilities enabled by modern digital and Internet technology, these two speeches have summoned ... View all references) that infuses Black hero dynamics, legacy practices, heritage tools, memory, and ancestor ...
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... Now, the Akan Ghanaian word, Adinkera simply means saying good-bye to one another when parting. But as it is often the case in human associations, saying good-bye brings mixed feelings, in most cases there is optimism with the... more
... Now, the Akan Ghanaian word, Adinkera simply means saying good-bye to one another when parting. But as it is often the case in human associations, saying good-bye brings mixed feelings, in most cases there is optimism with the bright thought and cheering hope of ...
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By pursuing the study and interpretation of the cosmology of Afrocentric womanism we can critically interpret the structure and metaphysical emphases of the broadly defined genres of Africana women's autobiography and personal narrative... more
By pursuing the study and interpretation of the cosmology of Afrocentric womanism we can critically interpret the structure and metaphysical emphases of the broadly defined genres of Africana women's autobiography and personal narrative that direct contemporary attention to the continuum of Africana women's intellectual traditions. The methodology of reading Africana women's narratives in order to discover the function of new variables such as immortalization theory, impermanent mortality, cognitive framing, and intergenerational stewardship advances a revised definition of Afrocentric womanism that has the capacity to transform how we regard the words and wisdom of the culture's female exemplars from 1834 to the present.
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This edited collection emerges as a new source in Africana Cultural Memory Studies that supports Africana Studies-based analysis of cultural memory, cultural mythology, heroics, legacy, survival, myth, heritage, and African-centered... more
This edited collection emerges as a new source in Africana Cultural Memory Studies that supports Africana Studies-based analysis of cultural memory, cultural mythology, heroics, legacy, survival, myth, heritage, and African-centered memorialization in the realm of sports history and biography/autobiography. In this volume, Ali is an "African American" or "Africana" Hero, which differs substantially from the norms of highlighting Ali as "An American Hero."
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This book retrieves the concept of mythology from its Black Arts Movement origins and extends it into a new conceptual framework for Black Cultural Mythology--a cultural memory emphasis on how Africana people heroically survived... more
This book retrieves the concept of mythology from its Black Arts Movement origins and extends it into a new conceptual framework for Black Cultural Mythology--a cultural memory emphasis on how Africana people heroically survived enslavement and how "survival" (and not trauma, as is often the emphasis in slave memory studies) is the key concept of literary narratives that seek to maintain the culture's mythological structure. The study identifies a heretofore unacknowledged intellectual tradition of Black cultural mythology that intersects with the emergent sub-field of Africana cultural memory studies, especially in terms of its attention to memory, heroics, myth, and mythology. The study approaches the actual legendary activity elevated to mythology or cyclical heroic storytelling rather than fabricated creation stories.
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Emerging directly from within the discipline of Africology, this is a monograph about teaching literature as a distinct Africana Studies-based literary exercise, especially in comparison to the norms of English Department-based... more
Emerging directly from within the discipline of Africology, this is a monograph about teaching literature as a distinct Africana Studies-based literary exercise, especially in comparison to the norms of English Department-based assumptions that are normalized through African American literature anthologies. It features over a dozen chapters that reflect the type of methodological grounding that is effective to "teach the discipline" as an objective even in literature courses, without sacrificing literary integrity. It highlights and models features such as pairing, Africana reader-response, the bibliographic shift, isolation, canon summary, disciplinary competency, applied functionality, Africana phenomenology, and dutiful survey. In the end, the book challenges us to consider the question of "What do we do AFTER we read?" which is an embodiment of how academic knowledge translates into practical application and social responsibility.
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This critical anthology offers two important introductory research essays that survey how the field of Comparative Literature (much from its own critiques) has not granted a real opportunity for immersion in a truer Comparative Black... more
This critical anthology offers two important introductory research essays that survey how the field of Comparative Literature (much from its own critiques) has not granted a real opportunity for immersion in a truer Comparative Black Literature academic study. Then, as a corrective, the anthology presents dozens of works and excerpts that reiterate the depth of global Comparative Black Literature. The anthology includes fiction, poetry, drama, short stories, and essays from the U.S., Brazil, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Trinidad, Tunisia, Egypt, Britain, Guadeloupe, Uganda, Grenada, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Ecuador, Martinique, Liberia, Russia, Senegal, and St. Lucia. Chapter 2 includes a groundbreaking, reproducible document called "Suggestions for African-Centered Literary Analysis" that is an important tool for defining the expectations of literary analysis in the discipline of Africana Studies.
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In this monograph, Literary Pan-Africanism is tool for cultural and literary analysis that grapples with several questions: (1) How did continental Africans learn about the worldview of the Africans who experienced enslavement in the... more
In this monograph, Literary Pan-Africanism is tool for cultural and literary analysis that grapples with several questions: (1) How did continental Africans learn about the worldview of the Africans who experienced enslavement in the Americas, (2) how did this knowledge inform African literary characterizations of African American characters, and (3) what was and is the nature of the types of Pan-Africanism instigated in African literature that features African American characters? This study offers a broad historical survey of interaction and exchange, a content analysis of the journal Black Orpheus, and uses of literary Pan-Africanism as literary criticism for works of West African writers (Soyinka, Aidoo, Awoonor, and Armah) who create African American characters in their texts.