What Black Studies is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. This essay is adapted from my remarks as the 15th Annual Donald K. Smith Distinguished Lecturer, Baruch College, New York, December 6, 2010.

2. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

3. See Ngugi wa Thiongo, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic, 2008).

4. The importance of this type of work has been most recently described by Africanist/Linguist Christopher Ehret: “Word histories directly register the cultural events of human history. From each word's history we can infer different individual elements of the human history that lies behind the changes the word has undergone. From the histories of many words together we can build up a complex understanding of the history of the society as a whole. And from applying this kind of research to regional collections of societies and their languages, we can construct intricate regional histories of the longue durée.” History and the Testimony of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3–4.

5. This subject has been addressed in book-length form very rarely. Representative examples include Kwesi Otabil, The Agonistic Imperative: The Rational Burden of Africa-Centeredness (Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press), 1994, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Dakar, Senegal: CODESIRA), 1997, and Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton: Africa World Press), 1990. See also Greg E. Carr, “Toward an Intellectual History of Africana Studies,” in Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (ed.), The African-American Studies Reader, 2^nd ed. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press), 2006. That chapter is part of a book-length work in progress.

6. A full discussion of the intellectual genealogy of Africana Studies would go beyond the scope of this paper. It is important to note, however, that the field's origins in the US academy must be traced to insurgent activity among African-descended academics at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The efforts of, among others, Du Bois at Atlanta University, Oliver Cox at Langston University, Charles Johnson at Fisk University, and the coterie of scholars at Howard University during the first half of the twentieth century are the proper roots of what we now call Africana Studies.

7. Hedges writes: “In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite.” Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 9.

8. Cruse wrote late in life that Afrocentricity might serve as “a philosophical basis for cultural equity battles.” Harold Cruse, “Afrocentricity: A Philosophical Basis for Cultural Equity Battles,” in Maria Morena Vega and Cheryll Y. Greene (eds), Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1993), 11–21.

9. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

10. Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 96–98.

11. Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

12. The convergence of German and English cultural contexts in the creation and reification of the contemporary academy is chronicled compellingly in two recent texts: William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Rise of the Modern Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010).

14. Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, 9.

13. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). See also Nowile Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Phillip M. Richards, Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), which compares Henry Louis Gates (and other thinkers not discussed by Baker) to representative African American thinkers of previous eras such as Du Bois and Sterling Brown. Richards argues that there has been an “erosion of moral reflection” compared to the earlier period.

15. A critical and instructive text in this regard is the exhibition catalogue edited by Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney and Allyson Purpura entitled Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in Art History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007).

16. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Whither Now and Why,” in Herbert Aptheker (ed), The Education of Black People, Ten Critiques, 1906–1960 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 195.

17. Du Bois in Aptheker, 111–133. For an extended discussion of the possibilities of Africana Studies at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, see Greg Carr, “Can We Talk [For a Minute]?: Social Sciences, Humanities and the Question of Africana Studies,” Center for African and African American Research, Duke University, March 26th 2010. In January, 2011, Howard University completed a process of academic program review that contained a recommendation that it pursue the development of a graduate program in Africana Studies. This development presents the American academy with a heretofore unrealized opportunity to institutionalize graduate training in Africana Studies-specific content area mastery and research methodologies that will extend, adjust and refine the efforts of the initial Temple University graduate program a generation before.