Dr. Ty-Juana Taylor
A recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles in ethnomusicology, I specialize in African and African American music and culture. I received my M.A. from UCLA in 2011, and a B.M. from the University of Louisville in 2009.
“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is
easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been
clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and
conflicts without any context. If I were not African, I would, after watching the coverage, think
of Africa as a place of magnificent wild animals in which black Africans exist as tour guides, or
as a place of desperately poor people who kill or are killed by one another for little or no reason.”
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2006-