African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements

The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies: Back to the Future?

In 1997, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza wrote as president of the African Studies Association that the field of African studies had been plagued by perpetual crisis since its institutionalization in the 1950s. The crisis had its roots in deeply embedded historical structures of race and hierarchy, on the one hand, and institutional power over the production of knowledge on the other. He wrote that scholars in the field were working in “unyielding solitudes” and “bitter contestations” that divided African American from European American and from African scholars. Until these solitudes could be transcended, the field would continue to founder. He went further in his challenge: he suggested that the crisis of the 1990s could lead African studies “back to the future,” as cold war–era strategic concerns declined and a return could take place to transcontinental scholarship that was both intellectually rigorous and socially responsible.¹

Sandra E. Greene, speaking as president of the African Studies Association the following year, made a similar argument, stating that the crisis in the field would continue so long as Africanist scholarship from the North continued to play a gatekeeping role and remained detached from African realities. Greene stated that the time had come for a strong bridge between Africanist and African scholars, as a necessary precondition for the field to flourish, stating that it was imperative that African studies address its uncompleted agendas and unacknowledged concerns.²

William Martin and Michael West wrote hopefully, in an article titled “A Future with a Past,” echoing Zeleza, that African studies during this time of crisis was moving into a post-Africanist era. While powerful institutions may have been seeing their demise in the post–cold war world order, Martin and West were optimistic about the possibilities for an African studies centered in Africa and untethered from military funding and developmentalist paradigms. They anticipated that the field would diverge productively from “One Africa” to “Many Africas” without a single hegemonic paradigm.³

These and other significant interventions in the 1990s sought to open a more global vision of African studies, one that left behind the narrow nationalisms of cold-war area studies and embraced its roots in African diasporic intellectual traditions, while bridging the conventional subdivision of the continent into sub-Saharan and Northern Africa. The end of area studies could allow not only for a return to a broader intellectual geography in African studies, but also the inclusion of multidisciplinary explorations that would no longer be restricted by the need to serve national strategic agendas.

Nearly twenty years have passed since these debates about the crises confronting the field and hopes for a different future. Where do we stand in African studies? Has the field been transformed since the late 1990s?—and if so, how? Have we continued to suffer from “perpetual crisis”?—or have we built enduring bridges across continents, constituencies, and disciplines? Has the militarism and strategic developmentalism of the cold war given way to a more just and rigorous scholarship? All these questions need to be raised and debated as we consider the relationships among African studies, global studies, and the disciplines.

The picture today is a mixed one. We still have much, much more work to do in order to build bridges between scholars and continents that will be sustainable and enduring, for despite these perpetual calls for partnerships and collaboration, efforts have continued to be piecemeal and often patronizing, originating from the needs and interests of Western scholars, donors, and institutions. And we have not yet fully extended our partnerships to African studies institutions or stakeholders in the parts of the world characterized as rising powers such as Brazil, India, and China, preferring to study their activities on the continent, rather than to engage with them in knowledge production.

And our energies are distracted as we deal with a new crisis facing African studies today, the critical crisis of resources. The precipitous fall in financial support from traditional foundation and government sources over the last decade has affected research on African languages and in the humanities and social sciences. Yet...