The Black Studies Reader

Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel, Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415945530
• eBook ISBN: 9781135942564
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Black studies emerged from the tumultuous social and civil rights movements of the 1960s and empowered African Americans to look at themselves in new ways and pass on a dignified version of Black history. However, it also enriched traditional disciplines in profound and significant ways. Proponents of Black and ethnic studies confronted the false notion that scholarly investigations were objective and unbiased explorations of the range of human knowledge, history, creativity, artistry, and scientific discovery. As they protested against hegemonic notions like universal psychology and re-evaluated canonical texts in literature, a new model of academic inquiry evolved: one committed to serving a range of populations, that critiqued traditional politics, culture, and social affairs, and worked with activist energy for the transformation of the existing social order. With an all-star cast of contributors, The Black Studies Reader takes on the history and future of this multi-faceted academic field. Topics include Black feminism, cultural politics, Black activism, lesbian and gay issues, African American literature and film, education, and religion. This authoritative collection takes a critical look at the current state of Black studies and speculates on where it may go from here.

PART I: THEORIZING BLACK STUDIES

SECTION A Evolution of Consciousness

1 THE INTELLECTUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICANA STUDIES

Robert L. Harris Jr.

AFRICANA STUDIES IS THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ANALYSIS of the lives and thought of people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world. It embraces Africa, Afro-America, and the Caribbean, but does not confine itself to those three geographical areas. Africana studies examines people of African ancestry wherever they may be found—for example, in Central and South America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Its primary means of organization are racial and cultural. Many of the themes of Africana studies are derived from the historical position of African peoples in relation to Western societies and in the dynamics of slavery, oppression, colonization, imperialism, emancipation, self-determination, liberation, and socioeconomic and political development.

There have been four stages in the intellectual and institutional development of Africana studies as an area of scholarly inquiry. The first stage began in the 1890s and lasted until the Second World War. During this first stage, numerous organizations emerged to document, record, and analyze the history, culture, and status of African peoples. For example, the Bethel Literary and Historical Association of Washington, D.C., formed in 1881, sponsored lectures on numerous topics, such as the Egyptians, the Zulus, and various aspects of African culture, in addition to contemporary issues affecting African Americans. Other organizations functioned in a similar manner—for example, Philadelphia’s American Negro Historical Society, established in 1897; Washington, D.C.’s American Negro Academy, also started in 1897; and New York’s Negro Society for Historical Research, organized in 1911.

These early black literary and historical associations sought to preserve and to publicize the legacy of African peoples. They were superseded in 1915, when Carter G. Woodson formed the Association for the Study of Afro-American (formerly Negro) Life and History (ASALH), which still survives today. Woodson laid the groundwork for systematic study of African peoples through the association’s annual meetings; the Journal of Negro History, launched in 1916; the national observance of Negro History Week (now Black History Month), started in 1926; publication of the Negro History Bulletin, begun in 1933; and the formation of Associated Publishers to print books on the Black experience in America and throughout the world. ASALH has been the premier organization in promoting historical consciousness and in generating greater understanding of African heritage in the United States.

In 1897 W. E. B. Du Bois initiated an ambitious program at Atlanta University to examine various categories of African-American life in ten-year cycles. He proposed that such studies be continued for at least one hundred years to provide knowledge and understanding of the Black family, church, social organizations, education, and economic development in the United States. From 1898 to 1914, the Atlanta University studies produced sixteen monographs, which consisted of more than 2,100 pages of research. Du Bois, Woodson, Lorenzo J. Greene, Charles H. Wesley, E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph J. Bunche, Charles S. Johnson, Abram Harris, Sterling Brown, and other pioneering Black scholars produced an impressive body of scholarship to correct the errors, omissions, and distortions of black life and history that prevailed among white academics and the American public.

The second stage for Africana studies began with the study of Black America by Gunnar Myrdal. This stage was in some respects a setback. Myrdal, who began his project for the Carnegie Corporation in 1939, confined his analysis to the American social, political, and economic order. There was growing concern about the role and place of the Black population during the Second World War, as a majority of African Americans became urban. Black migration northward, which had begun in large numbers during the 1890s, had accelerated during World War I, and had slowed during the Depression of the 1930s, mushroomed during World War II, making the Black presence in America more a national than a regional or primarily southern concern. Believing that Black people in the United States were fundamentally Americans who had no significant African cultural background or identity, Myrdal accepted the formulation of the University of Chicago School of Sociology that ethnic and racial contact led not only to conflict but also to inevitable assimilation and absorption into the dominant society. His two-volume study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, had an important influence on scholarship, especially the work of white academics during this second stage.

White scholars, by and large, had ignored Black people. The Columbia University historian John W. Burgess had boldly stated: “[A] black skin means membership in a race of men which has never itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.” After World War II, as the Black population in the United States became predominantly urban and as scholarship in general shed notions of inherent racial inferiority and superiority with the Nazi debacle, white scholars devoted increasing attention to African Americans’ status in the United States. They sought environmental rather than biogenetic explanations for African Americans’ inferior status.

In Mark of Oppression (1951), Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey hypothesized that African Americans emerged from slavery without a culture, with “no intra-psychic defenses—no pride, no group solidarity, no tradition.” They argued: “The marks of his previous status were still upon him—socially, psychologically, and emotionally, and from these he has never since freed himself.” Stanley Elkins in his book Slavery (1959) concluded that African Americans were not genetically inferior but were made inferior by the process of enslavement, which they internalized and passed on to succeeding generations. In Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan attributed African-American status to the absence of middle-class values and norms among the Black population in general. Two years later, in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan wrote: “Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American.” He concluded that “the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.”

Whereas Burgess had implied that Africans had never created anything of worth and therefore African Americans were descended from an inferior people, post–World War II white scholars, in the main, identified African-American status not with an inglorious African past but with deficiencies occasioned by slavery, segregation, and discrimination. It is important to note that these scholars believed that the end of racial oppression would not immediately produce racial equality, not because of lack of social opportunity but because of the accumulated pathological behavior of Black people. In other words, Black people were not divinely created inferior but were made inferior over time. The sum of racial oppression and its alleged internalization by Black people dramatically affected their lives across generations.

Another significant post–World War II development was the creation of African studies programs that had no real link to Black people in the New World. Although Melville Herskovits, a white anthropologist and proponent of African studies, tried to join the study of Africa with the lives of Black people in the New World, African studies became wedded to a modernization theory that measured African societies by Western standards. African history, culture, and politics were explored more within the context of the colonial powers than with any attention to African cultural continuities in the Western Hemisphere. This compartmentalization of knowledge regarding Black people departed significantly from the scholarship of individuals such as Du Bois and Woodson during the first stage in the development of Africana studies.

The civil rights revolution, the Black power drive, and the Black consciousness movement initiated a third stage of Africana studies. During this era, larger numbers of Black students entered predominantly white colleges and universities. Most of these students were the first generation of their families to attend college. They encountered faculties that were almost entirely white and a curriculum that was primarily Eurocentric in perspective. The “melting pot” thesis prevailed as the paradigm of American society in which all groups, regardless of background, assimilated to an ideal that was primarily white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Ironically, at a time when African nations were achieving independence from colonial rule, Africa seemed unrelated to Black people in the United States. If Africa was discussed in classes, it was generally as an adjunct to European imperialism. In large measure, Black people were seen as pawns rather than as actors, as victims more than as victors.

Together with many Black scholars from the first stage of Africana studies, Black college students challenged the prevailing orthodoxies on predominantly white campuses. They demanded the employment of Black professors and the establishment of Africana studies departments and programs. They pressed for the inclusion of African studies in the newly formed Africana studies programs. The inclusion of African studies was important for several reasons. First, African Americans have historically linked their destiny with the future of Africa. Second, the image of Africa has had significant consequences for the status of African Americans. Third, African ancestry has informed the cultural heritage of African Americans as much as their presence in the United States. Fourth, the history, politics, and culture of Africa could stand as a counterweight to the dominance of Western culture in American education.

The Eurocentric focus of the college curriculum basically excluded people of African ancestry or studied them through a European filter. Eurocentrist scholars ignored the growth of civilization in Africa, especially in Egypt, or co-opted Egyptian civilization as part of a European rather than an African continuum. They also ignored the African heritage of African Americans, characterizing them as having begun their existence in North America as tabulae rasae—blank slates to be imprinted with Euro-American culture.

Although some colleges and universities were willing to establish Africana studies programs, they were less willing to organize Africana studies departments. Faculty within the traditional departments were reluctant to give up their prerogative of determining what constituted a course in history, literature, or government; who would take such courses; and how the professors teaching them would be evaluated for employment, promotion, and tenure. Advocates of Africana studies departments questioned how members of traditional departments that had not offered courses on the Black experience or hired Black faculty could sit in judgment on the nature and quality of work being done in this newly emerging field of study.

The third stage of Africana studies, from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, was a period of legitimization and institutionalization. Few scholars were prepared to teach Africana studies courses. The shift in perspective from Eurocentrism to Afrocentrism required the recovery, organization, and accessibility of research materials that made Black people, their lives, and their thoughts the center of analysis and interpretation. Many white scholars in particular had assumed that there was not sufficient documentation on which to base sound judgments about the personal and collective experiences of Black people in the United States. However, with the new interest in black life and culture, federal, state, and local archivists combed their collections for materials on the African-American experience and published several useful guides. Major projects began assembling and publishing the papers of Black leaders, writers, and organizations. It is now clear that there are abundant materials (print, visual, and sound) to reconstruct and to interpret the African-American past.

The prodigious research of Black and white scholars has dramatically changed the manner in which we now view African Americans. Most scholars today acknowledge the persistence of African culture in the United States. They no longer accept the idea that African Americans passively acquiesced to oppression, recognizing that, on the contrary, they actively resisted oppression in a variety of ways. In large measure, scholars have come to accept the United States as a pluralistic society with multiple viable cultures, rather than as a “melting pot.” We think more of acculturation, with give-and-take, than of assimilation—particularly in the form of total absorption into the dominant culture, which itself is now being redefined.

Africana studies has achieved legitimacy and has become institutionalized within higher education. It now has moved into a fourth stage of theoretical refinement and more sophisticated analysis and interpretation. The fundamental research tools have been developed, although there will certainly be a need to update and to supplement them as new materials become available. In general, the field is in fairly good condition, but there are some problems, or perhaps opportunities to improve it.

Because the formats for multidisciplinary programs vary from campus to campus, there will probably not be a single method of organization for Africana studies. The ideal format is the department structure, which allows for selection of faculty and development of curriculum. Programs with faculty in traditional departments can also be successful, provided that they have some control of faculty lines. The program, however, becomes a more complex arrangement, especially in decisions for hiring, promotion, and tenure. Joint appointments carry similar problems, especially for junior faculty. They are less burdensome for senior faculty, whose tenure has already been established. Cross-listing of courses is one means by which departments and programs can take greater advantage of faculty resources on their campuses. However, before such cross-listing can be effective, there must first be a strong core faculty within the department or program. Otherwise, the Africana studies curriculum becomes too dependent on the priorities of other departments.

One goal for the fourth stage of Africana studies should be to broaden and deepen the field of inquiry. This prospect becomes somewhat difficult for those departments and programs with limited numbers of faculty. Small faculties are stretched thin when they attempt to offer a major and to cover Africa, Afro-America, and the Caribbean. Offering a comprehensive program in Africana studies has meant that some departments and programs play primarily service roles in providing introductory courses that are used to fulfill one or more distribution requirements for graduation. These efforts have little opportunity to supply depth in the field of study. Faculty become very much occupied with servicing large introductory courses and have little time for research and writing in an area of specialization. There is a tendency for faculty to become generalists familiar with a broad range of knowledge rather than specialists who advance the frontiers of specific areas of knowledge.

As Africana studies moves into its fourth stage, as well as its third decade on predominantly white campuses, there is a need to reexamine the curriculum on many campuses. Some departments and programs offer a hodgepodge of courses that have evolved over time in response to student interest and faculty availability. Many departments and programs, particularly those with small faculties, need to determine what they can do best with their resources. Some have specific strengths upon which to build; others need to reconsider where they want to concentrate their resources. Unless they have the faculty and the administrative support, many departments and programs cannot offer successful comprehensive Africana studies courses. In a 1986 report on the “Status of Afro-American Studies in the State University of New York,” Dr. Kenneth Hall showed that the preponderance of students are attracted by courses on Afro-American history, the civil rights movement, film, music, and contemporary Africa. Courses on history and culture (literature, music, film, drama, and dance) seem to appeal most to a cross section of students (Black and white), with politics close behind.

In many respects, Africana studies faculty need to return to the basic question: Africana studies for what? There was much discussion and debate on this question during the early days of organizing, when the focus was on the quest for legitimacy and institutionalization. On many campuses, Africa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CREDITS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THEORIZING BLACK STUDIES
• PART II: CONCEPTUALIZING CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY
• PART III: SEXUALITY, EDUCATION, RELIGION
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS