I think these sort of mesh together...
Well, yay for the British Academy, what: Historian David Olusoga awarded President’s Medal: The writer and broadcaster has brought diverse stories from Britain’s past to a wider audience: Olusoga, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker, best known as the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, is the 39th person to be given the President’s Medal, which is awarded annually in recognition of services to the humanities and the social sciences....
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Olusoga, 51, is a professor of public history at the University of Manchester and received an OBE in the 2019 new year honours list for services to history and to community integration. He is also the presenter of acclaimed documentaries, such as the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, Black and British: A Forgotten History, and the current A House Through Time. Olusoga received the award for his approaches to British and international history by unearthing and telling stories from Britain’s past to a wide audience. He has previously spoken about the rapid growth of hostility to his work and why black history is British history.
And, relevant to this in the wider European context, came across this review: Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History: Olivette Otele unveils the entangled history of Africa and Europe by narrating the diverse stories of African Europeans. In doing so, she vividly demonstrates how Europe’s violence toward Africa influenced and continues to influence the lives and identities of African Europeans. Despite this violence, the narratives she presents reveal resistance to racialization and marginalization in the homes they made for themselves in Africa, Europe, and the rest of the African diaspora. Otele’s work complicates African and European history, details the complexity of African European identities, experiences, and biographies, and shows how this group has contradicted stereotypes promoted by white Europeans. It is particularly impressive that Otele’s perspective on African European history does not default to the standard Eurocentric view of Africa. Rather, she emphasizes the reciprocal relationships between Africa and Europe. Here a Eurocentric view is subverted in favor of a more nuanced recounting of African European history. This is a transnational story of movement-a complex fluidity that is reflected in the identities of African Europeans. The term “African European” itself is complex and challenges a phantasma of a homogeneously white European society and history.
I also recently came across this post trying to reclaim the novels of best-selling African-American novelist Frank Yerby for 'deconstructing the myths of the Old South and tearing down the social constructions of race that have dug their roots deep into our cultural psyche'.
Hmmmm. I observe that the author of that piece first encountered Yerby in one of the later works in which he was trying to rebrand himself as a serious novelist writing on serious issues rather than an author of pulp romances. Having, in my omnivorously reading youth, read most of Yerby's oeuvre, I'm not entirely persuaded that he 'used the historical romance genre and moonlight and magnolias setting to challenge and educate his readers'. Quite aside from egregious attitudes around gender and sexuality which, well, okay, of the period, but still...
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