Carolyn Brown

My primary research interests are in West African labor and social history. I am still working on the Nigerian coal miners - an article about the 1949 massacre of miners. Additionally my current book project is a social history of the nationalist movement in Nigeria in Enugu, Nigeria ('Red' Enugu} which focuses on several social groups who give the colonial city its cultural and contested nature. Tentatively entitled, “Cowboys’, Letter Writers and Dancing Women: Identity and Struggles over Space, Leisure and Time in a West African City: Enugu, Nigeria 1914-1955”, the project looks at how race, class and gender identities are shaped in the colonial city and how these identities impact upon the 'popular classes' response the nationalist discourse. One major theme is 'urban masculinity' and how it is constructed historically by middle class clerical workers from the Black Atlantic of Sierra Leone, Brazil, Lagos, a gang called the 'Cowboys', and African business men. Other groups include professional letter writers, women street venders, 'respectable' women, child domestics. The project takes me to Porto Novo, Rep. of Benin where the Aguda (Brazilian retournees) clerks constituted yet another Black Atlantic community. A second area of long standing interest is the impact of the slave on southeastern Nigeria, an area where 1 million slaves were obtained. I am directing a project w/ colleagues in Nigeria interviewing people in villages in southeastern Nigeria on video and documenting how the slave trade is remembered. This is called 'Memories of Sorrow and Loss, - the Slave Trade and Southeastern Nigeria’, and is sponsored by Rutgers, the Harriet Tubman Resource Center for Diaspora Studies [http://www.yorkuca/nhp/]at York University, Canada , the Enugu Historical Society and the Schomburg Center of NYPL. I am also involved in a second project to publish oral accounts of the slave trade in collaboration with scholars in Africa and the U. S. to create a type of 'African WPA Narratives' on the slave trade.

• Undergraduate: Ancient Africa; West Africa; Southern Africa; African Labor History; Imperialism; World War II and Africa
• Undergraduate: Historical Studies - African Urban History; Violence in Africa;
• Undergraduate Seminars: African Urban Social History; Africa in World War II; Gender, Race and Class in African History;
  
• Graduate Courses: Colloquium in African Labor History; Graduate Colloquium in African History

• Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, proceedings of the international conference, Nike Lake, Enugu, Nigeria. C. Brown and P. Lovejoy, eds., Red Sea Press (anticipated 2005)
• “The Iva Valley Mining Community: Nigerian Coal Miners, Protest and Gender, 1914-1949”. S. Berger and A. Croll, (eds.), Towards a Comparative of Coal Mining Societies. London: Ashgate Press (in press, 2004)
• “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace: Colonial Racism, Worker Militance and Igbo Notions of Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1930-1945”, L. Lindsay and S. Miescher (eds.) , Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth, N.H. Heinemann (2003)
• “‘Memories of Pain and Sorrow’: The Oral History Project on Memory and the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria”, S. Diouf, ‘Fighting Back’: African Strategies Against the Slave Trade. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. (2003)
• We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann (2003)
• “Becoming ‘Men’, Becoming ‘Workers’: Race, Gender and Workplace Struggle in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1937-49”, P. Alexander and R. Halpern, (eds.) Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa, London: MacMillan Press, 2000
• “Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: Twentieth-Century Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern Igboland 1920-29,” Journal of African History (1996) 37.
• “Struggles Over the Labor Process: Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, during World War II,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1996) 15
• “The Dialectics of Colonial Labour Control: Class Struggles in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1914-1949,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 33 1-2, (1988) 32-59.
• This article was reprinted in, Third World Workers:Comparative International Labour Studies, ed. by P.C.W. Gutkind (E.J.Brill Press, Leiden, 1988), 32-59.
• “Apartheid and Trilaterism: Partners in Southern Africa,” in Holly Sklar, ed., The Trilateral Commission: Elite Planning for World Management. South End Press, 1980.
  

• 2003 Book of the Year Prize, International Labor History Association for We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950. Heinemann (2003)
• 1998-99, Fellow, American Philosophical Society [fieldwork in Nigeria]
• 1998-99, National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow, Schomburg Center, N.Y. Public Library
• 1989-91, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, Univ. of California, Berkeley,
• 1986-87, Postdoctoral Fellow, Joint Committee on Africa, American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council. Fieldwork in Nigeria and England
  

• European Social Science History Association, Network co-chair ‘Labor’, 2004-
• Advisory Board, Nigerian Hinterland Project/Harriet Tubman Center for the Black Diaspora, York University, Canada. 2001-
• Editorial Board, African Series, Cambridge University Press, 2000-
• Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of African History , 2001-
• African Studies Association. Board of Directors. Policy Planning and Decision Making Body for Association. Board Member, 1993-1996.