Guest Speaker, Summer Cooperative African Language Institute, Welcoming Orientation and Reception, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, June 17 2007
Almost invariably, the construction and conceptualization of knowledge have social, spatial and temporal contexts and referents. Few would disagree that knowledge, whatever the prevailing disciplinary labels, is produced through specific paradigms that are developed by certain groups of people in particular places and periods. Knowledge production is, in this fundamental sense, a spatialized social practice notwithstanding the vigorous, but often vain, attempts by some scholars to free their disciplines, specialties, theories and models from the supposedly suffocating confines of time and space. The disciplines and interdisciplines are rather porous and changing branches of knowledge, epistemic and social constructs whose intellectual, institutional, and ideological configurations are mediated and mapped by the unyielding demands of historical geography.
In the academies of Euro-America, I would like to submit, the argument between the interdiscipline of area studies, in which African studies is located, and the disciplines of the academic departments is essentially about the territoriality and temporality of knowledge and knowledge production: universality is claimed for the disciplines and contextuality for the area studies. And ‘area’ itself is parsed further: the disciplines are a preserve of the ‘West’ and ‘area studies’ of the ‘Rest’. It is a hierarchical division of academic labor that is powerful and appealing to many, one that is institutionally sanctified in the Euro-American academy in the relatively low positioning of area studies faculty and programs. It is reproduced in the perennial debates between the disciplines and the area studies, which are praised or pilloried for their alleged propensity to description and detail, local knowledge and exoticism, or complicity with imperialist impulses or multiculturalist political correctness. These characterizations, as will be demonstrated in the next section, are simplistic and seriously flawed.
African studies has both disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions, disciplinary in so far as it is the object of research, study, teaching and publications in specific disciplines and interdisciplinary in situations where these activities are institutionally organized in specific African studies units whether called—the administrative nomenclature varies—programs, centers, institutes, or departments. These tendencies have a territorial dimension: within Africa itself there are few African studies programs as such because Africa is lodged within the disciplines, unlike what prevails in Euro-America where the area studies model was invented and African studies programs provide a crucial institutional base. This parallels the relatively weak position in the American academy of American studies as an interdiscipline compared to the incorporation of American studies in the disciplines. In both cases, ‘area studies’ refers to, by and large, an ‘outside’ study, in the case of Africa study of the hegemonic imperial ‘other’, in the case of Euro-America the study of the colonial or postcolonial dependent ‘other'.
There are other crucial differences in the organization of ‘area studies’ in Africa and Euro-America: the latter’s overdetermination of African knowledge systems remains palpable, while the African influence on Euro-American scholarship is quite negligible, notwithstanding the wishful claims made by the authors of Africa and the Disciplines (Bates, Mudimbe and O’Barr 1993). This underscores the uneven and unequal ways in which the disciplines and interdisciplines are internationalized between the global North and much of the global South including Africa. It suggests that the terms of global intellectual exchange, like the terms of trade for the so-called developed and developing economies, are decidedly unequal: African studies in the North are a peripheral part of the academy, whereas the Euro-American epistemological order remains central in the African academy. Since the colonial encounter, the construction of scholarly knowledge about Africa has been internationalized both in the sense of it being an activity involving scholars in various parts of the world and the inordinate influence of externally generated models on African scholarship.
More often than not the scholars who have tended to set the terms of debate and discourse in African studies, prescribing much of what is deemed authoritative knowledge, framing the methodological and theoretical terrain of the field, and shaping the infrastructures of scholarly knowledge production are Euro-American rather than African. There is perhaps no other region in the world that has suffered more from what Paulin Hountodji (1997) calls ‘theoretical extraversion’ than Africa, where imported intellectual perspectives, preoccupations, and perversions play such a powerful role in scholarship, not to mention policy formulation and even popular discourse. It would not be farfetched to argue that the ‘area studies’ model, through which many African scholars educated in the global North were themselves trained, and through which academic relations between Euro-American universities and African universities are often organized, mediated or reproduced played a critical role.
My presentation is divided into three parts. The first part briefly explores the possibilities and perils of the area studies model as developed in the United States by examining some of the debates about area studies. The second part looks at the study of Africa in international studies, that is, the state of African studies as seen through the paradigms of globalization, transborder formations, and diaspora studies and the challenges of translation in transnational African studies scholarship. The last part focuses on African studies in different global regions: Europe, the Americas, and finally the Asia-Pacific region.
The Possibilities and Perils of the Areas Studies Model
Histories of area studies, like academic histories in general, are revealing for what they say and leave out, what they seek to remember and to forget. They serve as weapons in the perennial institutional and intellectual struggles among disciplines and interdisciplines for material resources and reputational capital. These histories seek to mark boundaries, to stake positions, to confer authority, and in the case of area studies, to define the alleged contemporary crisis of the field and devise solutions appropriate to the protagonists. In areas studies histories written in the United States in the 1990s it is commonly assumed that the Second World War gave birth to ‘area studies’ in the American academy, and the cold war nurtured the interdiscipline, in response to the grueling demands of global confrontation spawned by the two wars. It followed that since the cold war was now over area studies had lost their raison d’etre. Moreover, since much of the world was politically democratizing and economically liberalizing knowledge of the world outside Euro-America could be inferred from the universal models of the disciplines, or the homogenizing imperatives of globalization.
This narrative was quite appealing to right-wing ideologues who thought history was over; fiscally minded university administrators seeking programs to cut; and social scientists desperate to acquire the analytical credentials of the natural sciences. However, it was a narrative that silenced other histories of area studies in the United States itself and in other world regions.
There is no doubt that the Second World War and the Cold War had a profound impact on the development of area studies, and that the end of the cold war brought new contexts. But area studies, certainly African studies, antedated both wars as will be shown shortly. After World War II the area studies movement was bolstered by the need to overcome the isolationist and parochial tendencies of the American public and academy, increasingly seen as unbecoming and perilous for a superpower. The American public was woefully uninformed about the rest of the world, especially the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in fierce combat to win hearts and minds.
Reinforcing the national security imperative was the epistemological imperative to internationalize knowledge in the academy. While the link between social science and area knowledge goes back to the origins of some social science disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, most of the disciplines remained resolutely ethnocentric, an intellectual deficiency syndrome that worsened as they aspired to ‘scientific’ status and concocted, from American experience, universal models and theories that magically transcended the realities and diversities of global histories and geographies, cultures and societies, polities and economies. The theoretical conceit and parochialism of the disciplines reflected the imperial provincialism and ethnocentricism of the American public. Area studies were expected to overcome these deficiencies and to provide the public and academy with information about the non-Western world.
The interdiscipline was, therefore, infused with the twists and turns of American foreign policy, the projection of imperial power, in which knowledge of America and allied Europe more broadly was lodged within the disciplines, and that of the rest of the world was relegated to the area studies ghetto and inscribed with the pathologies of otherness. Consequently, the United States and Euro-America more generally was not considered an ‘area,’ which it obviously is, but at the very core of disciplinary knowledges, its experiences—rendered into stylized facts—and the epistemologies derived from them elevated to manifestations of the universal. So the pernicious fictions were born and bred that area studies were concerned with the parochial and the particular, while American studies, and their civilizational cousins—European studies—were disciplinary parables of the human condition.
Often forgotten in the fictions of disciplinary superiority and the interdisciplinary lack of area studies was the simple fact that area studies faculty were both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians: they were trained and held appointments in the disciplines. I discovered I was an area studies specialist only when I came to the United States to take up a job as director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (but my tenure home was in History). Before that in my previous appointments in Canada, Kenya, Jamaica, and Malawi I had been known as a historian or a dilettante given the breadth of my intellectual interests. In short, area studies people in the American academy are far less parochial than the Americanists or Europeanists who wear monolithic disciplinary identities. An American can be a professor in most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities without knowing anything about non-western societies and countries; what is almost unheard of is an Africanist or African professor who only knows the society she studies or comes from. Thus, it is not area studies people who need the rigor that comes from intellectual breadth and depth, but those in the ethnocentric disciplines.
The development of area studies was also tied to the fate of ethnic minorities in the United States. The ‘scientific racism’ that colored much of the earlier work on non-Western societies was rooted in racist and discriminatory policies at home against the Native Americans, African Americans, and others. The exclusion of these populations from political and cultural citizenship, from the American mainstream, necessitated the separation of their ancestral cultures and continents from disciplinary narratives. In short, given the centrality of race in American society and politics, the eternal solitudes between blacks and whites rooted in slavery and segregation, it meant that the privileges and pathologies of the wider American social and intellectual order were reflected and reproduced with a ferocious investment of patronage, passions, and pain in African studies in a manner that was unusual even among the area studies programs. More often than not, definitions and defamations of Africa were projections of attitudes to African Americans. The vocabulary used to depict the otherness and failed promises of Africa was often the same as that used for African Americans. This congruence of constructions and condemnations lay at the heart of the periodic contestations, often bitter, between Africans, African Americans, and European Americans in the study of Africa.
The shifting contexts, justifications, compositions, contents and predilections of areas studies were neither peculiar to the area studies movement, nor to the United States. During the same period that area studies as an interdiscipline was developing, the disciplines were also undergoing important shifts, desperately seeking to redefine and differentiate themselves from each other and to gain ascendancy on the academic totem pole, to stake superior claims of the cognitive authority of science in a world so conscious of its modernity and dazzled by science and technology. Studies of knowledge production in other parts of the world would reveal, as is shown briefly in this presentation and in greater detail in my recently published book, The Study of Africa, in the case of African studies in various world regions, similar tendencies. In the case of the United States, the area studies movement has undergone five phases each characterized by its own dynamics, orientations, and dominant perspectives and shifting engagements with the disciplines and other interdisciplines.
The first phase was in the late nineteenth century and was characterized by competing racist Euro-American and vindicationist Afro-American traditions. The early twentieth century marked the second phase when African studies was dominated by African American scholar activists and the historically black colleges and universities whose work centered on the question of Africa’s civilizational presence in the global concert of cultures. The cold war era marked the third phase when the gravity of African studies shifted to European American scholars and the historically white universities. The foundations bankrolled the field together with the federal government’s Title VI programs of the U.S. Department of Education and its analytical focus shifted to modernization prescriptions. This phase was dominated at first by anthropology, the principal colonial science. History briefly took over from anthropology in the anti-colonialist wrath of decolonization, and then political science and economics—yes the queen and aspiring king of the social sciences before their mathematical turn—assumed prominence in the great developmentalist drama of the early and euphoric postcolonial years. The turn of the 1990s ushered in the fourth phase—the post cold war era when area studies were deemed to be in crisis, a period that coincided with the ascendancy of the anti-foundationalist and representational discourses of postmodernism, postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, which questioned the integrity of regional and cultural boundaries and identities and privileged hybrid, immigrant, and diasporic identities.
Four major critiques were advanced against area studies, each of which was vigorously and sometimes effectively rebutted by area studies practitioners. First, it was argued that area studies were a cold war political project that had now outlived its usefulness. Second, area studies were “merely ‘ideographic,’ primarily concerned with description, as opposed to the ‘nomothetic’ or theory building and generalizing character of the core social science disciplines” (Szantzon 2004: 20-21). Third, some maintained that area studies scholars uncritically propagated the universalizing or localizing categories, perspectives, commitments, and theories of their imperialist interlocutors in the metropoles or their nativist informants in the postcolonies. Fourth, champions of globalization contended that the apparently new world order of enhanced transnational economic, cultural, information, and demographic flows rendered the old structures of organizing and producing knowledge in bounded regions increasingly obsolete. What was now required, in the place of old-fashioned area studies, it was argued, were international or global studies, or at the very least comparative regional studies. The Social Science Research Council abolished its area studies committees and the foundations duly withdrew their area studies funding support and launched new initiatives on cross-regional and globalization issues. But the American triumphalism of the 1990s was brought to a sudden halt by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. History was not over after all, and foreign cultures still existed that demanded understanding—translation—on their own terms. This ushered the fifth phase, marked by a return to the future of the national security imperative in area studies. The scientific pretensions of political science with its rational choice models, and the turgid postmodernist and postcolonial theorizing of literary studies suddenly looked rather self-indulgent and unproductive.
Africa in International Studies
The engagements between African studies and various international studies constructs have a long history. In more recent times globalization has been one of the dominant constructs. James Mittelman has offered a fascinating analysis of the implications for African studies of globalization as a conceptual paradigm. From the 1990s there was an explosion in the literature on globalization, seen both as a historical process of intensified transnational economic and cultural flows and interconnectedness and as an ideological project of global capitalism advancing the ideological project of global capitalism and its neo-liberal agenda of liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Mittleman distinguishes between what he calls the para-keepers who contest the theoretical claims and policy aims of the globalization paradigm and the para-makers who support them. As much else in scholarship, these divergences reflect not only different intellectual investments—ontological, methodological, and epistemological commitments—but also varied ideological, institutional, and even individual inclinations.
In the field of international studies the former include proponents of the realist, interdependence, and world systems perspectives and social democrats, for whom the processes associated with globalization are not new, while the latter consist of an eclectic group of scholars who believe globalization does constitute a new conceptual framework of examining the world and a new consciousness of experiencing the world. Mittelman highlights some of the major themes and traps of the globalization paradigm, which is concerned with global problems, challenges and actors, transformations in global structures and the territorial configurations of power, and continuities and discontinuities with the past in the world order. But it suffers from conceptual promiscuity and lack of precision, tends to be overdetermined, reductive and insufficiently attentive to agency, and spawns new binaries as it simultaneously explodes the old dichotomies of international studies. Nevertheless, the breadth of the globalization paradigm’s thematic and theoretical concerns—from economy to ecology, popular culture to transnational politics, cultural studies to political economy—is a potential source of critical strength, which gives it a transdisciplinary edge, the capacity to combat the fragmentation of knowledge. Mittelman insists needs to interrogate and incorporate the globalization paradigm more vigorously than it has so far; Africanist scholars have a responsibility to retell and remake the story of globalization.
One of the fundamental issues raised by the globalization problematic is the relationship, or rather the intersections between the local and the global, the external and the internal, the inside and the outside. Ron Kassimir argues that globalization is a very blunt instrument for conceptualizing the global-local nexus, disaggregating the various kinds of external-internal connections and how they relate to each other. He reminds us of the central insight of dependency theory, that ever since the emergence of the world system the external is always already implicated in the local, although many dependency writers were wont to overemphasize external forces and underestimate local agency, and to depict the structural forces largely in materialist and economistic terms at the expense of their ideational, political, and cultural dimensions. He proposes the concept of transboundary formations as an analytical device to transcend the external-internal divide and capture the dynamics created by the intersection of forces emanating from various spatial, social, structural, and sectoral levels. For example, the case of conflict diamonds bears testimony to the critical role played by the global demand and markets for commodities, cross-border smuggling of commodities and arms, and recruitment of mercenary forces in engendering and sustaining many a civil war and regional conflict that might otherwise be attributed to Africa’s alleged affliction with primordial hatreds.
Neo-liberal globalization has had severe consequences on African knowledge production systems. As is well known, structural adjustment programs devastated African universities, which led to massive migration of academics to other sectors at home or to institutions abroad. The growth of the African academic diaspora and of diaspora studies are, I believe, intertwined, as scholars such as myself and Zine Magubane, Ato Quayson and Nkiru Nzegwu, to mention only a few of my intellectual friends, have increasingly embraced diaspora studies. For me this does not entail an abandonment of African studies, but its expansion. Indeed, it represents a return to the future of the Pan-Africanist scholarship of Edward Blyden and W.E.B Dubois, who always tried to understand and situate Africa into worldly representation and recognition, to affirm an African presence that was both unique and equal to others, that Africa was a central part of the world. As a historian, I find that diaspora studies offer a key avenue to globalize African history and contest European appropriations of global history. It was partly because of this conviction that I embarked on a project on the history of Africa and its diasporas. The project seeks to map out the dispersal of African peoples in all the major world regions—Asia, Europe, and the Americas; compare the processes of diaspora formation within and among these regions; and examine the ebbs and flows of linkages—demographic, cultural including religion and music, economic, political and ideological, intellectual and educational, artistic and iconographic—between these diasporas and Africa over time.
Projects such as this have immense intellectual and policy relevance: They can help deepen our understanding of the complex histories and constructions of African diasporas and their equally complex and sometimes contradictory and always changing engagements with Africa, which is especially critical at this juncture as the African Union and other continental agencies as well as national governments seek to build more productive relationships between themselves and their diasporas. Already, Africa’s new diasporas constitute Africa’s biggest “donor”: we remit to Africa more money than all so-called foreign aid combined, recently estimated at $25 billion a year.
The epistemic communities in African studies are often divided by nationality, location and language. In this context the question of translation poses evident challenges, translation in the sense of cross-cultural access, reading and interpretation of scholarship on areas of mutual interest produced in different national intellectual traditions. Scholarship across national boundaries or epistemic communities, however constructed, especially in the human sciences can be conceived as acts of translation, in which scholars grapple with foreign textual and lived experiences—languages, materials, and perspectives—and strive, if they are scrupulous, to understand them both on their own terms and in terms that are also meaningful to their own cognitive universe and training. Translation is embedded in the very logic of area studies. Indeed, area studies can be seen, Alan Tansman (2004: 184) has argued persuasively, as a form of translation, “an enterprise seeking to know, analyze, and interpret foreign cultures through multidisciplinary lens.” The question of the transnational translation of area studies textual products is the subject of Jean-Philippe Dedieu’s captivating study that explores the problems of translation in France of work produced outside the Francophone world and in English by Francophone scholars resident in Anglophone countries. He shows that the reluctance to translate and engage foreign works, including Africanist texts, in France is rooted in a long and complex history.
Dedieu argues that French national identity consolidated itself, in part, through the selective domestication and consecration of foreign texts, as well as the imperial process of discursive colonization, which created the ‘translated men’ of the colonies and the postcolonies who have increasingly found themselves excluded from France as a space of both territorial and linguistic sovereignty. More and more the Francophone scholars have migrated to the Anglophone world, especially to the United States because of restrictive French immigration policies and institutional racism. The relocated Francophone scholars are forced to produce works in English, which are not readily translated in France. This exclusion has not been confined to Francophone scholars, but also applies to American Africanist texts and British authors in general. The disregard for American Africanist research, especially that connected with black studies, postcolonial studies and cultural studies, notwithstanding the inspiration some of these interdisciplinary perspectives have drawn from French theory, is based on a perceived epistemological divide between French republicanism and American multiculturalism, and French insularity and suspicion of U.S. hegemony. The problems of the publishing industry in France simply reinforce the political logic of exclusion. The result is that major works produced in the United States, including those from Francophone scholars, tend to be ignored, dismissed, or take too long to be translated.
African Studies in Regional Contexts
The study of Africa has become increasingly global. There is now hardly a region where Africa is not taught in one way or another, where Africanist research is not conducted, where Africa does not feature in academic, popular, or political discourses. But there are enormous variations in the levels of regional and national expertise and commitment to African studies, partly predicated on different histories of economic, political, and cultural engagements with Africa, as well as the relative presence or absence of African diasporas. Also, the production and consumption of knowledges of Africa are filtered through the exceedingly complex, diverse and shifting prisms of local intellectual traditions, ideological tendencies, and institutional cultures. The result is that it is quite difficult to make valid generalizations about the state or trends in African studies globally, except to say that nowhere does the field constitute a major area of scholarly attention. African studies and Africanists remain at the bottom of the academic ladder, even if in various countries they may stand on different rungs from the floor. This mirrors the position of Africa itself, whose international presence remains rather low save for moments of spectacular disasters, such as during the Rwanda genocide, or the periodic invocations of global panic as is the case with the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The oldest African studies traditions tend to be found in countries with long colonial histories or large African diasporas or both. Knowledge of Africa, however distorted or self-serving it may have been, was an essential part of the colonial project. Similarly, knowledge of Africans, however deficient or stereotypical, was a constituent element of the emerging intellectual fabric of the settler societies based on African slave labor in the Americas. It could be argued that the study of Africa has been driven, ideologically, by imperialist and solidarity imperatives; the former evident in the colonial and racial framings of African studies in France and the United States, for example, and the latter in the revolutionary and developmentalist thrust of African studies in the former Soviet Union and Sweden.
In his fascinating contribution, Bogumil Jewsiewicki offers a comparative trans-Atlantic, trans-linguistic mapping of the disciplinary evolution of African studies and its divergent trajectories in France and the United States. While the political and ideological inflatus for African studies are marked by the divergent historical relationship of each country to its African/Black Other, Jewsiewicki contends that a homology exists in terms of generational patterns and shifts in the development of African studies in both countries. These shifts, phases and generations in the United States saw the study of Africa informed successively by developments in Area Studies and Black Studies, while in the French situation, an early colonialist pedigree eventually gave way to a more centralized approach to African studies in various research units and clusters in the academy. African studies developed and was disciplinarized in both contexts because of the existence of an Africa of memory for the two countries. This Africa harks back to slavery in the case of the United States and colonialism in the case of France.
If African Studies in the U.S. was inspired and sustained by the political imperatives of superpower status and the presence of African Americans, in France it was initially stimulated by the aesthetic influences of African art on modernism whose global capital was Paris and later upheld by the ideology of anti-colonialism on the French left. Theory had greater import in French than in American African studies. It was only from the late 1960s that theory gained currency in the latter as anti-establishment students and faculty sought a new language of protest which they found initially in Latin American dependency theory and later in ‘French theory’. In France, the prominence given to theory not only resonated with the tenor French intellectual discourse, it also served as a means of differentiating French Africanists from colonial officials who launched the field of African studies. The investment in theory, largely Marxist, was facilitated by the absence of a recognized African political base in France, and theory functioned as an ideological expression of solidarity with Africa. While the events of September 11 in the United States promised to reinvigorate area studies including African studies, in France the riots of November 2005 and attempts to sanitize/positivize the memory of colonization have forced France to reckon with the place of Africa and Black people in its national imaginary which has implications for African studies in the country. One manifestation of this is the rediscovery, by the French academy, of cosmopolitan, migrant African intellectuals—the Manthia Diawaras, Mamadou Dioufs and Achille Mbembes.
For his part, John McCracken outlines the broad changes that have taken place in African studies in recent decades in Britain. He recalls the perilous state of the field in the 1980s as the number of Africanist faculty dwindled and resources declined and Britain lost its preeminent position in African studies to other countries, especially the United States. Now, McCracken happily finds that the pronouncements of the impending death of the field were greatly exaggerated. New programs have been established and a spate of young faculty appointments made, student enrolments have risen, and high quality research is being produced. Particularly vibrant has been the expansion of African studies in the related fields of cultural and diaspora studies and in the new universities converted from polytechnics in the 1980s. Much of the energy propelling the growth of African studies, which also poses a challenge to the interdiscipline as conceived historically in Britain, is the expansion of the country’s African and Afro-Caribbean communities. Among the challenges he identifies in addition to the perennial inadequacy of resources, is the need to develop more equitable and productive relations between the white and black British Africanists, as well between them and the African academics who have migrated to Britain since the 1990s and are part of new transnational African scholarly networks. He concludes on a cautious but hopeful note about the future.
In the annals of colonial history and European-African relations Germany is a little unique in that it was a colonial power but it lost its African empire after the First World War. The history of African studies in Germany is as long as it is in Britain and France, but it lost its colonial scaffolding much earlier. Peter Probst presents an intriguing account of the ebbs and flows in the development of African studies in Germany. It has undergone several phases from its beginnings in the mid nineteenth century when the field was founded by a small group of scholars and travelers. Although not yet institutionalized, African studies in Germany then was much more international and interdisciplinary than it became later. It was dominated by linguistics, a discipline that retained its supremacy until the early 1970s. During colonialism the growing band of German Africanists, many of whom were former missionaries, focused largely on deciphering migration and diffusion among African cultural areas, themes that echoed scholarly preoccupations within Germany itself on German migrations and cultural formation. The field became institutionalized in the academy after the colonial period and became quite vibrant in the interwar years, during which anthropology and its functionalist approaches gained ground.
The first two decades after the Second World War was a period of restoration, reorganization, continuation, and transformation, which saw the emergence of new disciplines especially literature and the arts, and politicization of the field fueled by the political pressures of decolonization and anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and the rivalries between the two communist and capitalist Germanys. In 1969, the German Association of African Studies was formed at the instigation of young linguists seeking to transform their discipline by exposing it to other fields in African studies. Ironically, this ushered the demise of linguistics’ dominance and the increasing ‘social sciencing’ of German African studies as history, law and political science gained prominence. Since unification in the 1990s, African studies in Germany has become both more differentiated and concentrated, thanks in part to funding formulas that favor the institutionalization of thematic collaborative research centers. One result is that the disciplines are losing ground to interdisciplinary research. Another recent development whose impact on German African studies is likely to rise concerns the entanglement of national and supranational research agendas driven by the growing importance of the European Union project and the creation of EU-wide African studies networks, foreshadowed by the establishment of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies in 1991.
The Nordic countries had limited contacts with Africa before and during the colonial period, which were confined to church missions and sporadic trade adventures. Not surprisingly, Nordic researchers were on the periphery in European academic discourses on Africa dominated by scholars in the major European countries. The development of African studies in the Nordic countries largely coincided with African decolonization and was marked by the formation of the Nordic Africa Institute in 1962 by the five Nordic ministries of foreign affairs. According to Ann Schlyter Swedish interest in Africa and African studies was motivated by the imperatives of small power global diplomacy, specifically political solidarity with the liberation movements in Southern Africa and economic support for development cooperation that was spawned by the ideological correspondence between the Swedish social welfare state project with the developmentalist state projects in the new states in Africa.
Thus, Africanist research in Swedish universities and other institutions has had unusually strong financial support from the state, which is channeled through the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation, originally an independent governmental body, but now a department within the Swedish development cooperation agency, Sida. While African studies in Sweden is spread across a wide range of disciplines, the dominant fields tend to be those whose findings can be consumed by the development cooperation organizations, the main market of knowledge about Africa. The developmentalist thrust of Swedish research funding also means a premium is placed on capacity building in Africa and research cooperation with African scholars on the continent rather than encouraging African scholars to work and settle in Sweden.
African studies have a long dynamic history in Russia and the former Soviet Union. As outlined by Irina Filatova, the field has undergone at least four phases each of which coincides with the significant periods in the country’s history. Before 1917 Russia’s African scholarship consisted of translations and writings on Ethiopia and South Africa and was strongly anti-British and pro-African. From the 1920s to the mid-1950s, it was dominated by the Comintern and focused on class and the labor movement in which South Africa also featured high. African studies boomed during the third period, the late 1950s to mid-1980s, with the establishment of African departments at several universities and institutes and the focus shifted from class to national liberation and from South Africa to the newly independent countries and widened to languages, history, politics, economies, literature and cultures, areas in which Soviet academics made some original contributions. Since the mid-1980s African studies has felt the winds of liberalization and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was marked by the removal of ideological controls, freer travel to Africa, but there were also severe reductions in state funding. From the late 1990s, Filatova observes, there has been a new momentum in Russian African studies and a revisiting of old and foray into new themes and topics of research (also see Davidson and Filatova 2001).
The field of African studies in North America is no less diverse if we take North America to include Canada, the United States, and Mexico; the common practice is to conflate the U.S. with North America. Canadian and Mexican scholars understandably object to this. African studies in the two countries have their own distinctive histories, in part framed by their very locations on the northern and southern borders of the belly of the contemporary imperial beast. Also, African diaspora populations in both countries are relatively small, and each country relates to Africa and race quite differently. Canada’s Africa relations are mediated by the legacies of British and French colonial empires in Africa, through the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, while Mexico has no similar mechanism through Spain whose African empire was negligible.
Race and racial hierarchies are foundational for the settler societies of the Americas. They frame the political and cultural economies of social life and public discourse including scholarship. As we all know, this is true of African studies in the United States itself. According to Pearl Robinson, the current President of the ASA, the Africanist enterprise has been characterized by the uneasy co-existence of at least three spatially-differentiated spheres of endeavor, what she calls the world of American research universities (dominated by European American scholars) that typically focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, the world of diasporic Pan-African scholars a polyglot realm that includes the historically black colleges and universities (dominated by African American scholars) that engages the whole continent as well as the diaspora, and the world of African universities and research networks that generally defines Africa in continental terms represented in the U.S. academy by immigrant African academics who have brought the preoccupations and anxieties of postcolonial Africa.
The development of African studies in the United States shares some parallels with the Caribbean. In fact, some of the scholar activists who pioneered African studies in the U.S. were Caribbean immigrants. But as societies in which the African diasporas have historically constituted the majority of the population, the politics of African studies has been different, lacking the racial overtones of the American experience, and premised more on different degrees of identification with Africa. Alan Cobley has insightfully traced the different tendencies in the development of African studies in the Caribbean. African studies is rooted in the inscription of Africa in Caribbean cultures and society from religion and diet to music and language, and from the creation of back to Africa imaginaries and movements to the construction of Afrocentric identities. Alongside this popular, organic African presence developed an intellectual tradition, the work of Caribbean intellectuals on African societies, cultures, and history and their impact on Caribbean modernities and identities. Most of these intellectuals were activists as well, ranging from Marcus Garvey and George Padmore to C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon and Arthur Lewis, who made significant contributions to Pan-Africanism.
But the establishment of African studies as an academic discipline came relatively late during the era of decolonization. The University of the West Indies was established in 1948 and nearly twenty years later the first academic program in African history was established by Walter Rodney, whose book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa became the bible of European indictment for a whole generation of radicalized African and diaspora students, including mine. Gradually African studies courses were introduced in other disciplines and today Africa is taught in disciplines as diverse as history, literature, philosophy, education, French, economics and law. Moreover, the faculty include a growing number of African scholars who have migrated to the Caribbean in the last two decades. My first teaching job when I completed my doctorate in 1982 was at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Cobley shows that the development of African studies has been uneven within the region. It is more advanced in the Anglophone than the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean. In the Hispanic Caribbean research into the African heritage and connections was until recently actively discouraged because of myths of racial creôlité—the term used in the French Caribbean—or because it was seen as a threat to the construction of new, post-revolutionary societies as in Cuba.
The country with the largest African diaspora in the Americas is of course Brazil. It is also the country with the most refined national myth of ‘racial democracy’, an ideology that seeks to sanitize and silence Brazil’s immense African demographic presence and cultural heritage. Mônica Lima (2006) has explored the teaching of African history and the history of Africans in Brazil. She notes that for a long time Brazilian historiography concealed and ignored the enormous contributions of African cultures and societies in the formation of Brazil. This was rooted in pervasive racism and attempts to whiten Brazilian society. When Africans and Afro-Brazilians appeared in the more progressive histories they lost their specificity and disappeared into hapless objects of capitalist accumulation and pillage. They were reduced to helpless victims of foreign greed, a pitiable people subject to exploitation, domination, destruction, slavery, and oppression, rather than as historical subjects, active agents in the making and remaking of their own history and the history of Brazil as a whole. Protracted struggles against marginalization—epistemic and economic, paradigmatic and political, conceptual and cultural, scholarly and social—finally led to passage of a law in 2003 making the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture as well as African history compulsory in the country’s public and private schools. She concludes by examining the challenges of turning this mandate into reality, the need to produce and disseminate complex, critical, and empowering histories of Africa and Brazil, in which the historicity and humanity of Africans and Afro-Brazilians are fully recognized, and that incorporate Afro-Brazilian connections to both Africa and the other Afro-American diasporas.
The global reach of African studies includes Asia and the Pacific, where several countries share varying degrees of historical and contemporary connections with Africa. One of these is India, which has had a long history of precolonial trading links and demographic and cultural flows with Eastern Africa and with Africa more generally through the circuits of British colonialism and anti-colonial struggles and the postcolonial solidarities of non-alignment and developmentalism. Aparajita Biswas has perceptively examined the development of African studies in India from the mid-1950s, whose growth owed much to the internationalist vision of India’s leaders, especially Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both of whom were Africanists in their own right. India’s independence leaders believed fervently in Afro-Asian liberation and resurgence and stressed the need for a clear and critical understanding of the world and the imperative to develop a cadre of academic specialists on various world regions.
Thus from the outset African studies in India had strong state support. It was built on the success of the Indian Council of World Affairs and under the auspices of the Indian School of International Affairs. A number of African studies centers were established at various universities with funding from the University Grants Commission, a statutory body for funding university education. Biswas briefly examines three of these centers (at the University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Mumbai University), noting their considerable successes and continuing challenges. The constraints faced by African studies include bureaucratic and infrastructural impediments, insufficiency of funds, inadequate facilities for libraries and documentation, problems relating to teaching and student enrolment, the lack of coordination between the area studies centers and the Ministry of External Affairs, and the preponderance of political science and international relations at the expense of other disciplines.
Australia is another country in the Asia-Pacific region that shares close imperial ties with settler colonies in Africa, especially South Africa. In fact, as shown by Tanya Lyons and Elizabeth Dimock Australia’s engagement with Africa began during the Anglo-Boer War when Australian troops fought on the British side. Events in South Africa have also had a direct academic impact: the years of the anti-apartheid struggles constituted the heyday of African studies in Australia and African migration to Australia have been dominated by waves of South African-born immigrants and others from the other former white settler colonies in the region—Zimbabwe and Namibia. It is also in South Africa that Australian universities have sought to establish a significant institutional presence in Africa. Unlike India, African studies in Australia has never enjoyed state support. In fact, the rise of neo-liberalism and Australia’s embrace of Asia has drained official funding for Africa. From a survey of the country’s 38 public universities, a disquieting picture emerges notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the Africanists and the high quality of their work. Only fourteen had any African studies in their teaching programs, and Africa was more often treated in a comparative context than on its own. History has been the dominant discipline, but the study of African literatures has grown. The rise of the ‘posts’ in the 1990s invigorated cultural studies, media studies, and musicology. NGOs and African immigrants and students provide potentially valuable constituencies for the field. But the Africanist community remains small and rather beleaguered; it has lost members who have shifted to Asian studies or to the more favorable Africanist markets of the U.S. and Britain.
The establishment of African studies in China from the late 1950s grew out of expanding ties between Africa and China in the aftermath of African decolonization and the Chinese revolution and shared concerns against European imperialism and for rapid development. As in India, there was strong ideological and fiscal support from the state. Chinese intellectual interest in Africa started much earlier and has undergone important shifts since then as shown in Li Anshan’s fine study. Although china-Africa relations go back to Pharaonic times, systematic Chinese studies of African began in modern times and were strongly influenced or mediated through Europe’s growing colonial expansion in both Africa and China. During the first half of the twentieth century Chinese publications on Africa consisted of translations or editions of world geography covering some parts of Africa, travel writings that described places in Africa, and books about Egypt long respected as a great and old civilization equivalent to China’s own. It was only after the 1949 Chinese Revolution that African studies was institutionalized and started to flourish with the establishment of African studies centers in various universities and research institutions. Much of the work focused on African nationalism. The translation of foreign publications expanded, but now preference was given to works by African nationalist leaders, serious works by western or Russian scholars, and reports to government and popular readers.
Anshan argues that the work produced during this period was more pragmatic than academic, largely generated in government units and history departments, and was done collectively. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) gravely undermined intellectual life in China as universities were closed for several years and student enrolment and instruction became excessively politicized. The end of the Cultural Revolution ushered in the most productive period for African studies. Nationalism continued to be a dominant topic of research, but in the 1980s there was greater interest on specific countries and topics from the Atlantic slave trade to the national bourgeoisie, a trend that intensified in the 1990s. Clearly, African studies in China has grown from a politically oriented to an academically oriented interdiscipline and expanded the range of its thematic and topical focus and disciplinary coverage. But challenges remain, which include, according to Anshan, the need to improve contacts between Chinese and African scholars and communication between Chinese Africanists and the general public.
The development of African studies in Japan has been no less remarkable in recent years as shown by Masao Yoshida, who notes that by 2001 the Association of African Studies, which was established in 1964, had surpassed 700. This is attributed to the liberalization of rules for establishing graduate courses in universities (previously regulated by the Ministry of Education) and the need for Africa-related expertise by the aid agencies. During a tour of several Japanese universities and research institutions in 2004 I was highly impressed by the quality and range of Japanese Africanist research. As elsewhere, African studies in Japan exhibit unique national features and preoccupations. One concerns the strong presence of natural scientists from zoology, primatology, botany, earth science, geology, and medical science. This rather unusual interdisciplinary engagement of social and natural scientists is complimented by the growing breadth of fields of study in the social sciences and humanities encompassing political science, law, economics, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, geography, agricultural science, literature, linguistics, arts and crafts, and music.
Recent Japanese African social science research shows interesting shifts. Particularly strong is research on agriculture and rural sociology. He argues that the preoccupation with community by Japanese Africanists comes out of the fascination and ambivalence among many Japanese about the existence of communal relations in their own society. The rural bias of Africanist research in Japan has meant that relatively fewer scholars study urban societies, but urban sociology and industrialization studies that examine the dynamics of urban life, rural-urban linkages, the informal sector, small-scale and large-scale enterprises are growing.
Conclusion
Clearly, today the study of Africa is a vast international enterprise encompassing Africa itself, the former colonial powers of western Europe, countries with large African diasporas in the Americas, as well as countries in Europe and Asia that have had no overt imperial relations with Africa. Half a century ago there were few institutions of higher education anywhere, whether in Africa itself or abroad, that took the study of African seriously. Despite all the noises we hear about the crisis of African universities in general or African studies in particular, there can be little doubt that thousands of people all over the world earn their living from teaching, researching, writing, or even celebrating and condemning Africa in a way that was unimaginable at the end of the Second World War when much of Africa was still under colonial rule. And countless books, journal articles, and reference works are published on Africa across virtually all the fields of academic inquiry. It is practically impossible now for any one individual Africanist, however prodigious, to read all that is produced in her discipline or area of specialization as was perhaps the case forty or even thirty years ago.
As a house of many mansions, a field with diverse, complex and infinitely fascinating disciplinary, interdisciplinary and global dimensions, the days when one country, one center, or one paradigm for that matter dominated the field of African studies are long gone. For some this apparent fragmentation is a source of deep concern, for others it represents scholarly pluralization that is a cause for celebration. For me it is a sign of the field’s maturation. Fundamental to the future of African studies is the revitalization of African universities and scholarly communities on the continent that have been devastated by more than two decades of misguided structural maladjustment policies. In short, African studies—the production of knowledges on and about Africa—through the disciplines and interdisciplines will, ultimately, only be as strong as African scholarship on the continent is strong. For their part, the new African academic diasporas are going to be crucial to the processes, however painful and difficult they may be, of establishing new, perhaps more equitable, transnational intellectual relations between Africa and the rest of the world. For those of us committed to the study of Africa in whatever institutional arrangement of the contemporary academy (disciplinary departments or interdisciplinary programs), and for whatever reason—epistemic, existential, or even economic—we must pay close attention to these changes and ensure that our beloved Africa is fully integrated in whatever intellectual configurations emerge in the new century. Thank you!
All authors referred to without dates are contributors in The Study of Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (see Book Reviews).