Breaking the Mold of Disciplinary Area Studies

At the outset of an edited volume on Intellectuals and African Development, the question is posed about what went wrong.¹ The call for self-reflection perhaps anticipates a further question—about how to account for the effects of area studies on scholarship in Africa in the era of independence and development. Much of this reflection has of course been occasioned by the work of scholars initially educated in African universities but later located in the American academy. Many have argued saliently about the perils of proceeding without significant and substantial overhauls to prevailing orthodoxies derived from area studies as they were constituted in the American academy. Perhaps one way to think about the anxieties produced by area studies for scholars of African studies relates to the manner in which the consolidation of institutions of higher learning in the West after the Second World War was buoyed by knowledge from elsewhere. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his musings on American area studies in South Asia, identifies the asymmetry between knowledge and institution as a hangover of an older connection between liberal education and empire.² He suggests that what made these Eurocentric assumptions invisible was in part the fact that area studies were still a matter of studying cultures that were foreign. The question is ultimately, what critical attitude is to be harnessed from within this scene of estrangement to articulate another perspective on the worldliness of knowledge that the late Edward Said once encouraged. Thinking about the inheritance of area studies after Said’s Orientalism or Valentine Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa is what now pressures a generation toward recharging the effective history of postcolonial criticism.

If area studies produced anxiety about being in the world among scholars writing on Africa, then we might add that its consequences are considerably multiplied in the context of Africa. Rather than simply function as a receptacle of knowledge produced in the US academy, the promise of trickle-down modernity is cause for reflection on how we might proceed, not at the expense of the US academy, but in relation to it, and beyond its preordained scripts of area studies formed at the height of the Cold War. This might require a reorientation, if not an overhauling of that which is called area studies in the United States, if not a breaking out of its disciplinary mold and political function.

In what follows, I wish to return to the blind spots and oversights of area studies, in part to identify more carefully the anxieties encountered in the American academy about the study of Africa, and more precisely to ask what it might mean to imagine area studies beyond the prescriptions of the justificatory structure of the Cold War. How did area studies come to matter at the institutional site of the university in Africa, if at all? What have been its legacies, and what have been its shortcomings for African scholars and institutions? Rather than simply affirm the reorientation of area studies, I want to call attention to what it is that area studies may have foreclosed, rendering it prohibitive, rather than generative, for the academy located outside of the West—what, in its blind spots and oversights, may have augmented the question “what went wrong” and more pertinently, “what is the way out?” This is not another effort at trumping area studies in the United States for their ideological attachments, but an effort to ask what it might mean to reorient them, from elsewhere, toward institutional forms, aesthetic education, and questions that pressure thought at the limit of the geopolitics in which area studies were first conceived. How can area studies, in other words, change American attitudes, rather than affirming its racial presuppositions about the rest of the world? If the Cold War implications of area studies are less of a concern in what I offer, it is to the extent that African studies as a specific instance of area studies had made common course with the civil-rights movements in the United States, and opened the face of area studies to the anticolonial nationalist and independence struggles in Africa.³ That...