Africana Studies, also known as Black Studies, is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to studying and understanding the experiences of African people and African-descended people across the Diaspora.
It grew most directly out of campus demands made by black students, and their allies and supporters, during the mass protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1960s, student activists across the United States participated in sit-ins, strikes, rallies, and protests with the goal of having colleges and universities establish institutional support for the study of the lives, history, and culture of black people.
From the outset, the goal of Africana Studies was to transform higher education, chiefly by addressing the lack of faculty and staff diversity; altering traditional curricula limited by Eurocentric paradigms; centering the study of people of African descent in the university canon; linking academic teachings and scholarship with social and civic engagement; and raising critical questions about the purpose of scholarly knowledge production, the nature of truth claims, and the overall mission of higher education.
Map of the African Diaspora.
The Rise of Africana Studies
Africana Studies was “the first in a series of academic fields that would challenge social hierarchies and diversify the academy. Soon after Africana Studies units appeared, ethnic studies and women’s studies followed.”
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As also is true for the related fields of Asian American Studies and Latinx Studies, the field has grown and expanded since its origins more than four decades ago. Africana Studies in the contemporary era incorporates varied disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, but retains its distinctive focus on social justice.
Key Aspects of Africana Studies
- Exposes students to the historical, political, social, economic, and cultural systems and institutions that frame the lived conditions and experiences of Africana peoples in the countries of the African continent and in its diasporic populations.
- Critically interrogates the various socio-historical contexts in which racialized western epistemologies developed.
- Examines such neglected areas of study as the important contributions to human labor, political and cultural expression, social development, and science and industry made by people of African descent in the modern era.
- Offers an interdisciplinary approach to the philosophical foundations of knowledge production and highlights the complex interaction between resistance, identity and culture in providing an enabling context for a range of identitarian expressions by Africans and peoples of African descent.
- Provides a critical approach to selected historical, social and cultural processes that are essential to an enhanced understanding of contemporary globalization.
The Scope of Africana Studies
Africana Studies is a multidisciplinary area of study. As such, it draws on the theory, methodology, and substantive content of your other courses. In fact, Africana studies provides you with a concrete case study for applying what you have learned in abstract terms in your other courses.
Africana studies is taught from a global comparative and cross-cultural perspective. Africana Studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores the histories, cultures, and lived experiences of people across the African Diaspora. It draws from a wide array of disciplines, including Literature, History, Politics, Religion, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and Education, within the broader Social Sciences and Humanities.
Juneteenth and Black Lives Matter: An Africana Studies Perspective
Africana Studies extends beyond the continental United States, encompassing the experiences of African-descended peoples worldwide, particularly those displaced by enslavement, genocide, war, migration, and other forms of systemic disruption.
Core Themes and Concepts
Unbound by but indebted to critical methodologies from disciplines like English, history, sociology, law, and political science, African American Studies centers black people.
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Michael Gomez makes a case for black intellectuals in the field of African American studies to more thoughtfully engage a larger diasporic approach with their work. African American Studies examines the experience of people of African descent in the United States and the Black diaspora, both throughout history and in the present.
The field also highlights key moments of black resistance and revolution as well as 19th and early- and mid-20th century intellectual movements focusing on various political, linguistic, and cultural factors undergirding the experiences of peoples of Africa and its global diaspora.
Several key themes and concepts are central to the field:
- Black Religion: Anthony B. Pinn argues that black religion, a capacious term that he purposefully deploys to reference a range of religious and spiritual practices beyond Christianity, plays a key role in African Americans’ struggle for what he calls complex subjectivity, a mode of being defined by ambiguity and multidimensionality.
- Gender and Incarceration: Sarah Haley argues that the prison industrial complex has been an important site in which racialized conceptions of gender have been consolidated.
- Black Nationalism: Daryl Michael Scott’s exploration of the vicissitudes of black nationalism that developed over the course of the early and mid-twentieth century negotiates a tension between black nationalism and other forms of nationalism.
- Whiteness as Property: Cheryl Harris explores the extent to which whiteness became a form of property that had to be protected by juridical and legislative means.
- Lynching: Lynching, a phenomenon of extra-juridical violence used as a tool of social control, continues to be a lesser acknowledged practice in American history.
The Evolution of Africana Studies
According to Dr. Harris’s framework highlights the progression of Africana Studies from grassroots efforts to document African heritage, through its focus on African American experiences during the Civil Rights era, to the development of formal academic programs with a global and interdisciplinary perspective.
| Stage | Description |
|---|---|
| Early Organizations (1890s-World War II) | Grassroots efforts to document and analyze African history and culture, challenging dominant narratives. |
| Civil Rights Movement Focus (Post-WWII) | Scholarship shifted to emphasize African American history and culture, reflecting the influence of the Civil Rights Movement. |
| Institutionalization of Black Studies | The establishment of formal Black Studies programs in universities marked this stage. |
| Global Perspective and Interdisciplinary Approach | The most recent stage broadens the scope of Africana Studies to include the global African Diaspora, incorporating perspectives from regions such as the Caribbean. |
Career Opportunities
The goal of in-depth study of Africa and the African Diaspora is the development of critical thinking, research, and writing skills that emerge from an increased awareness of the political, social, cultural, and historical roles played by peoples of African descent. A primary goal of the track is to give students a broader and more contextualized understanding of the scope and substance of the black experience in a variety of related areas.
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Graduates of Africana Studies go on to careers in academia, government, education and public service. Africana studies supplements any and all professions. In fact, Mae Jemison, a physician and the first African American woman to go into space, received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in chemical engineering and Afro-American studies.
Finally, job opportunities are increasing for students with broad backgrounds and intercultural and cross-cultural knowledge and experiences.
