Monique Bedasse, assistant professor of history and of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2018 Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history.
Sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, the prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book on the African diaspora. The prize was established in 1992 by the AHA Committee on Minority Historians, in honor of Charles H. Wesley and Rayford W. Logan, two early pioneers in the field.
Bedasse received the honor for “Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization” (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Drawing on research across three continents and five countries, Bedasse places repatriation to Africa at the center of Rastafari’s international emergence. She foregrounds Rastafari’s enduring connection to black radical politics and establishes repatriation to Tanzania as a critical prism through which to explore religion, race, gender, diaspora, citizenship, socialism and nation in the age of decolonization.
Read this Q&A to learn more about “Jah Kingdom.”
This is the second time that a member of the history faculty has won the Wesley-Logan Prize. In 2017, Sowande’ Mustakeem’s “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage” (University of Illinois Press, 2016) received the award.
