A native of Mali, Manthia Diawara received his education in France and later traveled to the United States for his university studies. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed. Routledge, 1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Diawara has directed several films including the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse (1995) and Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010).
