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Sami Nighaoui

Sami C. Nighaoui holds a PhD in English language and literature from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Manouba, Tunis. He is a Steinhardt School of Education (NYU, 2004) alumnus and holder of a diploma in educational leadership from the United States Department of State (Washington, DC, 2006). He co-founded the American Studies Research Group at the American Cultural Center in Tunis and the Research Group on Prejudicial Narratives at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in Kairouan, Tunisia. He served as Director of the English MasterÕs Program at the same faculty from 2014 to 2017. He currently teaches American Studies at Carthage University, Tunis. He is author of several articles on race relations in the United States, recently published a book on the African American liberal integrationist experience and edited two volumes on post-disciplinarity and deminoritisation.

Essentialism and the Revival of Black Power: Re-inventing American Integrationist Discourse

On July 24 2015, around 500 advocacy groups representing African American communities from all over the country met in a three-day conference at Cleveland State University to deliberate on the creation of a unified political front. Outside the conference facilities, demonstrators shouted slogans decrying what they perceived as deliberate institutional indifference to the plight of their communities in face of the dramatic upsurge of anti-Black racism, police brutality and violence committed by white supremacist groups. The slogans echoed in essence those raised the year before in what historians now call the “Ferguson unrest” in reference to the riots which broke out in two waves over the next four months following the death of 18-year old Michael Brown. The effervescent crowd fuelled further enthusiasm for the participants at the CSU conference who were by now intent on launching a political resistance platform to translate the slogans that had for long remained […]


From Exceptionalism to Transnationalism: Change and Continuity in American Studies

While traditional disciplines such as social science and history continue to provide American Studies with methods and insights that have proved vital for its development, it is today much more dynamic and versatile than what one might have expected of a field that, as J. C. Rowe observes, has long suffered from an “embattled institutional situation.”