Join ASA at the 69th Annual Meeting held December 3-6, 2026 in New Orleans, LA and attend this year’s ASA Keynotes featuring distinguished lectures, the Sembène-Kelani Film Prize screening, special performances, and a DJ and dance party. Keynotes are open to all Annual Meeting attendees.
Thursday, December 3, 2026
Sembène-Kelani Film Prize Winner Screening and Q&A with the Directors
Time: 12:00-2:45 PM
Location: Studio 6 (2nd Floor)
Our Land, Our Freedom directed by Zippy Kimundu and Meena Nanji. Followed by a Q&A session with the directors.
Q&A Session: III-O-22 The Sembène-Kelani Film Prize: What We Saw
The committee selected Our Land, Our Freedom, directed by Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu, for its compelling account of how colonial dispossession continues to shape contemporary Kenya. Following Wanjugu Kimathi’s search for the remains of her father, anti-colonial leader Dedan Kimathi, the film connects an intimate quest with the unfinished struggle for land restitution. Through Wanjugu and her mother, freedom fighter Mukami Kimathi, the documentary restores women to the history of Kenya’s independence movement while confronting the British violence that displaced communities and left its beneficiaries largely untouched. It shows with force that political independence did not resolve the question on which the liberation struggle was founded: who has the right to the land.
Presidential Lecture: Nwando Achebe, “Amaechina: May Our Path Never Close”
Time: 7:00-8:00 PM
Location: Acadia Ballroom
Each year, the President of the African Studies Association gives a lecture for Annual Meeting attendees.
Nwando Achebe is a University Distinguished Professor, Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, and Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation at Michigan State University. A multi-award-winning historian, she is a 2022–2023 ACE Fellow, founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of West African History, co-director of the Christie and Chinua Achebe Foundation, and co-CEO of Achebe Masterworks, LLC. She is an elected member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and serves as President of the African Studies Association.
Achebe earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2000. Her scholarship centers on oral history and the study of women, gender, power, and sexuality in Nigeria and across Africa. She is the author of six books, including Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings; The Female King of Colonial Nigeria; and Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa.
Her research has been supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, Ford Foundation, World Health Organization, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Friday, December 4, 2026
African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture: Adom Getachew, “’A Free and Unfettered … Intercourse’: A Pan-African Vision of Free Movement”
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM
Location: Acadia Ballroom
The African Studies Review together with the ASA Board launched a distinguished lecture in 2011 featuring state of the art research in African Studies.
Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). As part of a four-member curatorial team, she curated the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism. Her public writing has appeared in Boston Review, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.
Inaugural Chinua Achebe Distinguished Lecture: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Fanon’s African Revolution”
Time: 7:00-8:00 PM
Location: Acadia Ballroom
The biennial Chinua Achebe Distinguished Lecture focuses on humanistic scholarship and creative industries defined as architecture, design, fashion, film, music, visual and performing arts, and literature.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU and President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in London to a Ghanaian father and an English mother, he moved before his first birthday to Kumasi, Ghana. He took the BA and PhD in philosophy at Cambridge and has held professorships at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton. He discussed African and African American identity in In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture; examined global citizenship in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; explored gender, race, nationality, religion, and culture, as sources of identity in The Ethics of Identity and The Lies that Bind; and has written other books, including one about W. E. B. DuBois and another about honor. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. In 2024 he won the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity from the Library of Congress. His most recent book is Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science.
Saturday, December 5
Inaugural ASA Presidents’ Luncheon: A Conversation with Angela Davis and Gina Dent
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM
Location: Acadia Ballroom
Join ASA for lunch and a conversation with distinguished scholars Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent moderated by ASA Past President Ato Quayson. The discussion will engage urgent questions of Africa, liberation, abolition, intellectual life, feminism, global struggle, and the future of critical scholarship in a shifting world.
Tickets: for sale in MyASA until sold out or October 18. Purchase your ticket HERE
Sponsored by our generous supporters:
Stanford University Department of African and African American Studies
Dr. Steve Howard
Luncheon Menu:
– Award winning seafood gumbo with Jazzmen rice
– Louisiana tomato salad with Vidalia, blue cheese, & sherry vinaigrette
– Muffuletta pasta salad with peppers, olives, onions, & Italian meats
– Crescent City greens with cucumbers, tomatoes, croutons, smoked
bacon, blue cheese, & candied nuts served with buttermilk ranch & lemon thyme vinaigrette dressings (served disaggregated).
– Bronzed Gulf catch fish with crawfish etouffee
– Cajun spiced skirt steak with smothered peppers and onions
– Red beans & rice
– Southern-style green beans
– Squash creole with shrimp, okra, & tomatoes
– Warm cornbread muffins
– Warm mini white chocolate bread pudding bites
– Bananas foster cheesecake bites
– Mini fruit tarts
– Table side coffee service
*for dietary restrictions, please contact the ASA Secretariat.
Awards Reception & Dance Party:
Time: 7:30-9:00 PM and 9:00-12:00 AM
Location: Acadia Ballroom
Dress your best and join us for an evening of food, drinks, jazz, dancing, and celebration. Arrive at 7:30pm to snap a photo on our red carpet and enjoy light appetizers, a cash bar, and jazz before the awards begin at 8:00pm. Stay for our Dance Party starting at 9:00pm with a special guest DJ.
