Ekwueme Michael Thelwell
Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
Ekwueme Michael Thelwell is Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. He was the founding chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and recently retired as a member of the faculty in 2009 as Professor of Literature and Writing.
The Jamaican born writer, activist, educator, intellectual received his early education at Jamaica College. He came to the United States in 1959 to attend Howard University and went on to do his graduate work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Professor Thelwell was active in the Black Freedom Movement, participating in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Professor Thelwell's anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s resulted in successful legislation enacting a law against corporate tax write-offs for U.S. based corporations paying taxes to the apartheid regime in South Africa. He considers this law his most effective and consequential political achievement. In addition to his political achievements, Professor Thelwell was also a senior advisor for the television series, Eyes on the Prize.
As a writer of fiction as well as of influential essays, Professor Thelwell's work has been published nationally and internationally in journals and magazines including the Black Scholar, the Massachusetts Review , Temps Moderne, the Partisan Review, Presence Africaine (Paris), the New York Times , and African Commentary . His novel The Harder They Come (1980) has become a Jamaican classic, and his political and literary essays are collected in Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts (1987). After the death of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) in 1998, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell prepared Carmichael's memoirs for publication. The long awaited memoir of the controversial civil rights leader and Pan-Africanist revolutionary was published under the title Ready for Revolution : The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (2003).
Professor Thelwell is presently at work on a critical study of the novels of Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe. Professor Thelwell's literary awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Society for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Centennial Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.
Selected Publications:
- Ready for Revolution : The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael
- Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts
- The Harder They Come
Courses Taught
- African Literature: Chinua Achebe
