Aisha Marilyn Abdulbary-Knotts | Staff Writer
I recently attended the Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture, which featured Dr. Jennifer Hart, chair of the History Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and left conflicted.
Hart, who is of European descent, gave a lecture titled “Historical Assumptions, Conceptual Illusions, and Other Lessons Learned by Thinking in the Margins.”
While Dr. Hart is clearly a thoughtful academic who has dedicated her career to researching African urbanism and mobility, her selection as the central voice on such a deeply complex African topic raises a few uncomfortable but necessary questions, especially when power, privilege, and positionality are all embedded in the subject matter.
To be clear, this isn’t about discrediting Dr. Hart’s scholarship. She has published widely, including books titled “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” and “Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra.”
I firmly believe that academic spaces should absolutely welcome diverse voices, including those who study beyond their own lived experience. It was evident during Hart’s lecture that the time she has spent in Ghana has had a profound impact on her work and worldview. She even described her first visit to Ghana as a moment that upended her assumptions about power and history.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was looking for the kinds of narratives that made sense to me,” Hart said. “I had to learn to listen differently. That was the beginning of my journey into thinking in the margins.”
And yet, that very framing — a white woman coming to Ghana to “learn to listen differently” — evokes a familiar pattern: of self-discovery through the Global South.
During her talk, Dr. Hart encouraged students not to join organizations like the Peace Corps solely for the purpose of self-discovery, yet candidly admitted that her own trip to Ghana was initially an act of personal discovery.
“It was about me, even if I didn’t think of it that way at the time,” she said. “And that’s something I had to unlearn — that my understanding of the world wasn’t the only one.”
There’s undeniable value in that self-awareness. But when an institution chooses a white American woman to lead a lecture on European colonization and the cultural erasure of African societies — a topic with emotional, generational, and geopolitical weight — the choice isn’t neutral.
It communicates something, whether intended or not: that even in conversations about Africa, whiteness still holds the microphone.
This is especially striking given that the University of Lynchburg has shown a willingness to platform African and African American voices.
Most recently, acclaimed Nigerian-American author Jordan Ifueko visited campus. Her presence was not only refreshing but also necessary — a powerful example of how much more resonant and nuanced a conversation becomes when a personal or cultural connection to the subject matter informs it.
So why wasn’t that same approach taken here?
Dr. Brian Crim, chair of the University of Lynchburg History Department, spoke on the purpose of Dr. Hart’s lecture. He explained that Dr. Hart was invited because of her public advocacy for history education and her leadership as department chair at Virginia Tech.
“Jennifer Hart was not selected to speak on African life and culture. She was chosen to speak about the crisis in the humanities, specifically the discipline of history,” Crim said.
“She is active in lobbying the state of Virginia on promoting humanities… and she has experience with the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said.
Dr. Crim added that while Hart drew on her research in Ghana under British colonial rule to illustrate her points, the broader goal of the event was to address “why history matters and what we can learn from the research process.”
Still, even with that clarification, the optics are hard to ignore. Hart herself acknowledges the risks of what she calls “conceptual illusions,” where academic frameworks are imposed on experiences they weren’t built to explain.
“We are constantly using conceptual tools that were not made for the places we are trying to understand,” Hart said. “And that matters, because it determines who gets to be seen as credible, as knowable, as real.”
That reflection is deeply important — and, ironically, it reinforces the core of this critique. Because when institutions default to white scholars to discuss African erasure, they unwittingly perpetuate the very dynamics those scholars are critiquing.
As Hart herself put it, “Who gets to define what is real is always a question of power?”
Dr. Crim acknowledged that the speaker selection process itself has room for improvement.
“There is not much of a process to select speakers beyond faculty choosing them,” Crim said. “This is imperfect and should probably be changed in the future.”
Dr. Crim also acknowledged that “it would be appropriate to prioritize an African or African-descended scholar to give a lecture on African history or politics.”
He affirmed the importance of student engagement and representation, saying, “Students are the most important audience on campus. If students were unhappy with a lecture or speaker, that is something we as faculty want to know.”
He also expressed support for student involvement in future decisions:
“I fully support forming a committee of students and faculty to select speakers in the future. Students should have a prominent role in deciding the topics as well.”
These are meaningful commitments, but they also underscore the need for institutional accountability. Choosing Dr. Hart may have been academically justified, but it was contextually jarring. When an institution has the chance to elevate voices from the Global South, especially on topics that directly affect them, shouldn’t that be the priority?
This isn’t about gatekeeping knowledge. It’s about understanding the symbolic power of who gets to stand behind the podium.
Who gets to “teach” Africa to an American audience? Whose interpretation do we still value most?
The university has taken steps in the right direction. Inviting people like Jordan Ifueko proves that. But progress isn’t just about occasional representation; it’s about consistent, intentional choices.
If we’re going to talk seriously about decolonization, then we have to start by decolonizing the structure of the conversation itself.
And that begins by asking: Who gets to tell the story — and why?
