The world has lost an influential scholar. He was an accomplished scholar in the fields of African cinema, African Literature, and Postcolonial studies, among other related fields, over the past five decades. After graduating with a B.S. from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1964, he moved to New York University to complete his graduate studies in English (M. A. in English, 1965) and Comparative Literature (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 1970). Even as he worked towards his doctoral degree (thesis: "The Transformation of the Rebel: A Comparative Study of the Works of Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Miller"), he began teaching at Michigan State in 1966.
By 1989, Harrow earned a full appointment as a Professor in the Department of English after teaching in the Department of Humanities from 1966 to 1989. He complemented his appointment at MSU with multiple terms outside of Michigan, including Summer, Spring, and Winter terms in London, Paris, Dakar, and Mexico, as well as visiting professorships at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop-Dakar in Senegal (Department of English, 1989) and the University of California, San Diego (Department of Literature, 1989). From 1982 to 1983, he delivered important lectures at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, and the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He also taught in Cameroon. For over two decades, Professor Harrow was very active in administration at Michigan State University, where he served as the Director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature (2000-2002) and later as a Faculty Excellence Advocate (2011-2015).
Professor Harrow's scholarship is significant because it greatly altered the contemporary understanding of African literary modes. His scholarly published work, represented by edited volumes, over fifty journal articles, and two dozen book chapters, together with his single-authored books, illustrate his stellar academic stature and lasting contributions to the field. His book, Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition (1994), considered twentieth-century developments and novel tendencies in African literature as the continent managed the pressures and ambiguities of the postcolonial social situation.
In his Less than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing (2002), Professor Harrow again broke new ground on relatively unsurveyed spaces of literary criticism, using psychoanalytical methods to map out a critical understanding of the literature of francophone African women writers. In his third book, Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (2007), he reassessed the scholarship on African cinema by returning to the first techniques of African filmmaking and the initial critical reactions to them to interrogate the premises and the state of contemporary criticism of African cinema. Professor Harrow's most recent monograph, Trash! African Cinema from Below (2013) is equally trendsetting. It treats modern developments in popular African filmmaking in a globalized world, analyzing certain contemporary aesthetic tendencies through the figure of trash in African cinema.
In addition to his accomplishments as an author, Professor Harrow has been active in forging fruitful scholarly discourses and interactions in the academic community in the United States and across the African Diaspora during his years as a scholar, a teacher, and a mentor at Michigan State University. From the early 1990s, edited important special issues in academic journals on themes such as "African Cinema," "African Nationalisms," and "Violence in Africa," and convened, organized, or coordinated several conferences (notably the 1986 and 1997 African Literature Association conferences held at MSU). He has also given innumerable invited lectures at universities in the United States and North and West Africa on topics ranging from African cinema and literature, modernism, and postmodernism to postcolonialism.
Simultaneously, Professor Harrow served in professional capacities for various organizations and publishers. He was the African Film Editor for the African Studies Review, the General Editor of the African Humanities and Art Series of Michigan University Press, a member of the editorial board of Research in African Literatures, and an occasional reviewer of African literature for such journals as PMLA, World Literature Today, and Africana Journal, among others. He was a member of the Executive Council of the African Literature Association (1981-84; 1992-95), as well as Vice President (1987-1988) and President (1988-1989), and also as a member of the Executive Board of the African Studies Association (1997-2000). He continued to organize the Film Showings and Video Film Marketplace of the African Studies Association. Apart from these important services to the academic community, Professor Harrow was a member of multiple award committees, from the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association to the James Lowell Prize of the Modern Literature Association.
His scholarly and professional work in the field has been recognized by numerous awards, beginning with an early award in the early 1970s, the NEH Younger Humanist Award, that enabled him to travel and conduct research in France, Algeria, and Morocco. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship later in the decade to research and lecture on American Literature at the University of Yaounde in Cameroon (1977-79) and again a few years later to conduct research in Dakar (1982-83). In the past fifteen years, Professor Harrow received another Fulbright fellowship on exchange at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (2005-2006) and other prestigious awards. The African Literature Association awarded him its first Distinguished Member Award in 2009. Michigan State University also recognized him with the Distinguished Faculty Award (2010) and the Paul Varg Alumni Award for Faculty. The University of Texas at Austin equally earned him the Distinguished Africanist Award (2011). The African Studies Association awarded him the African Studies Association Public Service Award and, most recently, the Distinguished Africanist Award.
Professor Harrow's impact transcended academia. Outside of academia, Professor Harrow served as a member of the United States Coordinating Committee for Central Africa of Amnesty International, specifically as the country coordinator for Burundi and Rwanda. In this capacity, he served as an expert witness to numerous asylum cases for these countries. He also served as coordinator for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After over forty years of remarkable research, teaching, and service at Michigan State University, Professor Harrow retired from MSU.
Rest In Peace.
PS: This piece was written when Ken was alive.
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