Grant Farred
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Grant Farred is a South African sociologist who is professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He has previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, and Duke University. He has written several books, served for eight years as editor of South Atlantic Quarterly, and is a leading figure in contemporary African-American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
Farred received a B.A. from the University of the Western Cape in 1987 and an Honours B.A. from the same institution in 1988; an M.A. from Columbia University in 1990; and a PhD from Princeton in 1997.[1] At Columbia, he studied under Edward Said, whom he has described as his mentor and as "a model for being engaged in political activities outside the university."[2]
He received a Fulbright fellowship in 1989, was a Du Bois-Rodney-Mandela Fellow at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in 1994–1995, and was a fellow of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke in 2002–2003.[3]
South Atlantic Quarterly
Farred was editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly from 2002 to 2010. When he left this position, he was described as having "widened the journal's theoretical and geographic scope while keeping it rooted in its long history of political engagement." In a discussion of the history of the journal with current editor Michael Hardt, Farred called his editorship of SAQ "the most important political thing I have done in this country in the twenty-one years I've been here." During his tenure, SAQ published special issues entitled "Palestine America," "Racial Americana," and "Ambushed: A Critique of Machtpolitik."[4] Farred also edited a special issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. "This issue," according to the publisher, "revitalizes Fanon's canonical status as Third World theorist by asserting that the main imperatives of Fanon's work remain as urgent as ever: combating the psychic and physical violence of colonialism, achieving real forms of liberation for colonized peoples, and ending the degradation of people of color."[5]
