African Studies and the Global: A Commentary

My task is to provide commentary on James Delehanty’s remarks on “Area Studies and the Global at Wisconsin and Beyond.” He offered an insightful assessment of the current state of area studies and provided details about the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS), recently opened at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Delehanty, an Africanist geographer and former associate director of Wisconsin’s African Studies Program, is a founding codirector of IRIS. I respond as the director of the African Studies Program at Indiana University at Bloomington in my second tour of duty, having first served from 1999 to 2007 and now again from the summer of 2015. I reflect on IRIS as Indiana University consolidates its own new international unit: the School for Global and International Studies (SGIS).

I agree with Delehanty that the most compelling research draws on specific cases to engage broader conceptual issues. The presumed divide between area studies and global studies is more imagined than real, as are major differences between area studies and disciplinary-based research—a tension imputed a decade or more ago. I add the nuance, given my work as a historian of the West African Muslim world, that research on the local can help transform totalizing understandings that sometimes emerge at higher levels of abstraction. The study of Islam in local contexts, for example, emerged in response to critiques of orientalism, an established approach in the Western scholarly tradition, defined by an emphasis on narrow textual analyses and infused with assumptions about enduring Muslim meanings attached to Arabic terms: studying local contexts included sensitivity to amplifications and elaborations of Muslim concepts occurring in specific communities over time. Research on the global and the local provides profound understandings of historical and social transformations.

I also agree with Delehanty that the primary challenge facing area studies today is budgetary, related to the economic contraction in academia. Institutional changes at universities across the United States have created new units, bringing area-studies centers together under the banner of international and/or global studies. Area-studies advocates often fear that it is a zero-sum game, with some areas benefitting and others not; or worse, pessimists assume that all area-studies units will lose funding and stature as resources and attention shift to professional schools. Perhaps in some cases these patterns will become manifest. What Delehanty argues, and I underscore, is that area-studies scholars must recognize value in the transformations that are possible in this new environment; we must embrace change and turn it to our advantage. Delehanty worked with others to give shape to IRIS at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and now to new arrangements as codirector, with sensitivities related to his background in area studies. While we may not be similarly situated with a prime seat at the table, we all can strive to influence the new configurations of area and global studies.

IRIS is a new unit, headed by two codirectors, who oversee the activities of Wisconsin-Madison’s area-studies centers and administer the undergraduate major in international studies in the College of Arts and Letters—a curriculum that transcends IRIS. The area centers are free to operate without direct intervention from the codirectors. Consolidation nonetheless occurs in various domains. IRIS now articulates one voice to other campus units, replacing the multiheaded hydra of each area-studies unit speaking autonomously. IRIS centralizes staff operations: while area-studies centers retain senior staff (director and associate director), support staff are shared with all area-studies centers in IRIS. These staff members are focused on function and not area, so finance, advising, records, and so forth are not handled by each unit, but are administered by a central staff. The resulting reshuffling of support personnel was handled humanely, with both retirements and career transitions helping with the adjustments. The changes were not merely a consolidation: there is a broadening of activities, as IRIS has received new funding to offer incubator grants across disciplines, with the requirement that researchers collaborate with scholars outside that tradition and in a distinct discipline.

SGIS is a new international unit at...