Speaker Series: Shadows of Empire: Race, Bureaucracy, and the Making of American Diplomacy with Dr. Naa Koshie Mills
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About the lecture:
Drawing on an institutional ethnography from the US Department of State in Washington, DC, this presentation explores ways in which ideologies of bureaucracy, racism, and identity structure and inform US foreign policy approaches to the Sub-Saharan African region and Black Americans’ role in this process. I contend that while Black Americans learn, practice, and implement expected norms of diplomatic statecraft, their approach, nonetheless, is framed by their racial subjectivity, phenomenological understandings of Blackness as it moves across borders, and attention to the complex interplay between US empire and racial hierarchies in global governance. Given the increase of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that promote the recruitment of persons of color into the government, this study interrogates the impact of Black leadership in diplomacy and wider implications for the future of American foreign policy.
Naa Koshie Mills is a Lecturer at Howard University and the Director of the Black Baltimore Digital Database, an online archive for community preservation. Her research examines the impact of race and racism in U.S. foreign policymaking towards Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the diplomatic lives Black American career officers in the Department of State (DOS). She was a career diplomat at DOS and served in the Bureau of African Affairs in Washington, D.C., Johannesburg, South Africa, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, two graduate degrees from Columbia University and Sciences Po in Paris, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.