Repositioning Africa within the Global

Africa has always been global. No matter how we define this spatial category—as a mode of connection, or a process of embeddedness within larger frameworks of historical and contemporary relation—Africa and Africans have engaged and shaped broader currents in the world. Jamie Monson, raising the idea of multiple Africas in her discussion of the future directions of African studies as an intellectual and political project within the American academy, highlights this understanding through the lens of diaspora and mobility to think about the continent and its peoples as constitutive of a world on the move. This is captured in the concept of transoceanic circulations, which she uses to frame a discussion of the material and commercial linkages that tied different parts of Africa to translocal and transregional economic and cultural exchange. But as a conceptual framework, the notion of circulation is sufficiently capacious to allow for the inclusion of mobilities that disassemble the artificial divides that intellectually construct and separate regions within Africa itself. In other words, the work that circulation does as an analytical concept is to help dissolve the equally bounded understanding of Africa as an area and East Africa, North Africa, and so on as regions. That scholars have devised projects and are carrying out research agendas that reflect this dissolution (slow though the process might be) is rightly recognized by Monson, as are the intellectual genealogies that have informed these perspectives.¹

In suggesting that we take circulations and mobilities seriously, Monson gestures toward a process of disaggregation of the conventional category of Africa to which many scholars, practitioners, policy specialists, and even the public still adhere. But by tracing Africa’s myriad social geographies along their structuring circuits and networks, we can more fully develop a mental map of the continent very different from the one held by many. For instance, the itineraries of movement that historically have involved contractual obligations, commodity exchanges across the Horn, East Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, adjoining islands, and the Red Sea would allow us to reposition these regions into a relational model, whose Indian Ocean boundaries were nonetheless fluid. This sort of rethinking aligns with the ways scholars have begun to reimagine other conventional geographical frameworks, such as the Middle East, in response to the oceanic and global history turn of the past decade.²

The emphasis on global African studies as proposed by Monson is therefore highly suggestive of new ways to think about Africa in the American academy—ways that allow space for posing new research questions around contemporary and past developments and realities. Monson highlights the importance of moving away from seeing Africa as a research site from which data are extracted and toward a collaborative model of knowledge production, which connects with the work of researchers and scholars on the continent. These “connections,” she notes, “will strengthen and sustain us together.”

While this may well be true, I think we need to recognize also that African institutions are not necessarily as interested as they once may have been in establishing partnerships with their American counterparts or other universities of the North. Indeed, this was hinted at in Monson’s recounting of the international symposium held at Peking University around a South–South dialogue. To add another, more recent example: “Re-Centering AfroAsia: Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period, 700–1500 bce,” a large-scale multiyear project recently launched in South Africa, involves partners and colleagues from universities around the country and the region, and institutions and communities from India. Apart from my inclusion, not a single institution from the North was involved.³ I expect we will see more of these dialogues as Africans on the continent reimagine their historical trajectories, and the West becomes increasingly decentered as a privileged site of theoretical and empirical knowledge production.

This is not to deny, necessarily, the engagement that African-studies institutions in the North can establish and maintain productively with African partners, as Monson is encouraging in her essay; however, this engagement requires a resource structure substantially different from the one that has steadfastly remained in place. Institutions in the United States remain tethered to a...