African Studies

AFRICAN STUDIES. A field of study nourished on international controversy, African studies became an arena of political scholarship from the 1960s. The revolutionary impact of African independence movements, the rise of African socialism, and the continuing influence of imperialism afforded a direct link between revolutionary hopes and intellectual concerns for at least a portion of the Left and of the academy in postwar America. Earlier, in the era of segregation, Black American readers learned of Africa through W.E.B. Du Bois’s brilliant 1915 introduction, The Negro, and from the path-breaking, interwar-year research on Africa at Howard University.

African studies became formalized as the postwar rise of America to world dominance, in an era of global social change, brought government support for area-studies programs in the 1950s. Fulbright programs, the National Defense Education and Foreign Language acts, and private foundations supported this expansion. The African Studies Association took form in 1957, under the leadership of anthropologist Melville Herskovits, of Northwestern University. The new organization was encouraged by the rapid independence of African countries, the American civil rights movement, and interest of the American state in extending its ties to Africa.

But the 1960s brought worldwide disappointment in the progress of social movements. In North America, Black Power advocates and white radicals spoke out: a clearly radical approach in American studies of Africa arose in 1969 at the ninth annual meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA), in Montreal. White radicals brought to the meeting a pamphlet entitled African Studies: The Extended Family, which criticized leading scholars for collaborating with American policymakers on Africa. Black and Canadian Africanists formed separate associations.

During the 1970s and 1980s, many studies appeared relying on Marxism and on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system approach. The new work by Marxists was particularly important in anthropology, but also in economics, history, and sociology, emphasizing the critique of modernization theory and the discussion of modes of production. By the time of the 1984 Washington meeting of the ASA, hosted by Howard University, the battles between black and white Africanists had subsided, as indeed had the polarization between radical and liberal tendencies. The Social Science Research Council sponsored a series of research overview papers by major disciplinary scholars.

African economies and universities declined from the late 1970s to 2005; leading African scholars found work in North America and Europe. Yet from 1989 a wave of social movements led to democratic governments in Southern Africa and in several French-speaking African nations. Then the HIV pandemic centered on eastern and southern Africa, rising from the 1980s, with deaths peaking in 2005. While transatlantic civil-society links grew, especially to South Africa, so also did US military intervention in Africa, with the 1993 intervention in Somalia. The United States established its Africa Command in 2007: it could not gain permission to settle its offices in Africa, but did intervene in Libya from 2011 and later in Niger.

In the United States, the Pan-African Caucus formed at the 1995 meeting of the ASA, linking scholars of African descent in a structure that gradually expanded their influence in the association. There were efforts to link ASA with CODESRIA, the Dakar-based African scholarly association, but ties remained distant. The concept of the African Diaspora matured and became a significant contribution of Black Studies to social sciences. The African Diaspora association (ASWAD) formed in 2000, holding biennial meetings in the United States and beyond.

By 2020, academic knowledge of Africa had advanced greatly. Scholars of color gained stronger representation in the profession; Africanist scholars earned wide respect and advanced in their professional organizations. But the continuing dominance of elite and civilizational perspectives in scholarship meant that, while Africanist scholars (white and Black) could be respected individually, their research results remained outside the canon, postponing the inclusion of African knowledge in the broader paradigm. Nevertheless, innovative analysis and concern for civil society persisted. A junior scholar in history of science, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, won the 2014 Herskovits Prize for colonial-era research on healing plants in six African regions, followed by a second book on nuclear power in Ghana. Michael Gomez, a senior scholar and founder of ASWAD, won the 2018 Herskovits Prize for a new interpretation of the medieval empires of West Africa.

Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Gomez, Michael. African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Manning, Patrick. “Locating Africans on the World Stage: A Problem in World History.” Journal of World History 26 (2015), pp. 605 – 37.

Website: African Studies Association. https://africanstudies.org