Baba Badji

Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, and researcher, and an Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow Associate with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ) and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is also an Inaugural James Baldwin Artist and Scholar in Residence at the University of Virginia’s Department of French. Badji earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow and an Edward A. Bouchet Honor Society Fellow. Besides English and French, he is fluent in Wolof, Mending, and Diola, and he calls on these languages in his writing. Badji’s first full-length poetry manuscript, Ghost Letters, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Awards. Badji’s Ghost Letters, Volume II is in progress. His novel, Madame Diawara, is also in progress, and several scholarly works are forthcoming.

Publications:

• A Poet's Life: On Making, On Being, On Surviving with Baba Badji '15 | School of the Arts (columbia.edu)
• The Poems of "Ghost Letters" Erase Boundaries of Language - Electric Literature
• The City and the Writer: In Ziguinchor, Senegal, with Baba Badji - Words Without Borders

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• theafricainstitute
• Négritude and the Diasporic Poem: the Importance of Wolof to Ghost Letters with Baba Badji (rutgers.edu)
• Decolonizing the Mind: In Conversation with Ngūgī wa Thiong’o | The Africanist Podcast

Previous Organizations

• Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ

• Washington University in St. Louis, MO

• Columbia University School of the Arts, New York City

Accomplishments

• Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow (cohort II)

• National Book Awards 2021 for Poetry

• Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow: The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice

Upcoming Projects

• DOC - CFP - NEW - 2023 Dakar Translation Symposium.pdf (ucad.sn)
• VERS LA CREATION D’UN CENTRE DE TRADUCTION, DE LITTERATURE ET D’ECRITURE A ZIGUINCHOR | SenePlus

• Négritude Polemics: Revisiting the Black Poetic Imagination in the African Diaspora refigures the Négritude movement as an unfinished project in the context of a globalized Blackness.

I am a Senegalese/American poet, translator, and a comparatist whose multi-dimensional research studies Transnational Black cultures, critical translation, and poetic and poetry. My work pursues an interdisciplinary analysis of Race, Africa, Blackness, and the Afterlives of Slavery anchored in Négritude. My multi-dimensional imagination of Négritude allows for a recognizing of the differences of Black people, cultures, and the systems of colonization within Africa and beyond. Whereas my dissertation, The Narrative history of Négritude: Black Poetic Imagination in Anglophone and Francophone Cultures undertakes a position that defends, traces, and contextualizes the concept of Négritude so that it appears as relevant in today’s thoughts of Postcolonial Literatures for the Black diaspora transnationally, (My scholarly manuscript in progress Négritude Polemics: Revisiting the Black Poetic Imagination in the African Diaspora refigures the Négritude movement as an unfinished radical project in the context of a globalized Blackness). In doing so, I rethink & reimagine Négritude as more than a poetics, but rather, as an epistemology that formulates radical Blackness in ways that continue to be relevant for the enduring Black struggles of today. As an interdisciplinary analysis, the book mobilizes archival documentation, biographical materials, correspondences, methods of translation, and poetics as tools that enable the examination of Négritude as an idea and a radical Black intellectual movement.