Graduate Students Roundtable Introduction

During the afternoon session of the symposium, five graduate students from various IU departments affiliated with the African Studies Program constituted a panel segment. The symposium’s concerns being prospective, it was felt that those in the process of becoming professional academics were well-placed to speak to this future. They had read all the speakers’ presentations and had prepared short texts in response, reflecting on the institutional challenges they perceive their respective disciplines to be facing. Their responses are articulate and specifically engaged, and the recurrent critical tone in them is indicative of changes that are sorely required. That such requirements pertain similarly to political science and comparative literary studies may be a function of the heightened awareness of students who have taken on the role of specializing in these fields, but it is also a function of the status of these fields in relation to the African continent. As unprecedented social changes put pressures on academic disciplines that subsist on tradition and predictability, conscientious scholars come to feel the pressures in the need to be reflexive and imaginative when confronted with an “object of study” which, while constantly changing, must subsist on the precarious practices of the roll of the dice.

The genre of the “state-of-the-discipline” has already become a standard mode of self-accounting in African studies in the United States. The more serious of such studies may have effected consequential changes, and only those who know can tell. As the cultural theorist Timothy Brennan puts it in Secular Devotion, his study of Afro-Latin music as an imperialized form of leisure and entertainment, the African continent “has become an ethical destination of those who want to flee all associations with [the West’s exploitative role], the embodiment of an unacceptable status freely taken on.” Besides the aforementioned critical note, one other thing that recurs in the papers published below is a sense of the African continent as a destination. Perhaps the generation of scholars speaking through these voices would link that objective desire for another day at the office closely with the ethical awareness through which one’s destination is inseparable from one’s destiny.