Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Handbook of Black Studies is the first resource to bring together research and scholarship in the field of African-American studies in one volume. Editors Molefi Kete Asante and Maulana Karenga, along with a pre-eminent group of contributors, examine various aspects of the field of Black Studies. Organized into three parts, this Handbook explores historical and cultural foundations, philosophical and conceptual bases, and critical and analytical concepts.
Interdisciplinary, Transdisciplinary, or Unidisciplinary? Africana Studies and the Vexing Question of Definition
Interdisciplinary, Transdisciplinary, or Unidisciplinary? Africana Studies and the Vexing Question of Definition
It is commonplace knowledge that Africana Studies emerged primarily as a consequence of political demands made by Black students, and the Black community at large, on White institutions to break their racist silence about, or otherwise gross misrepresentations of, the Black experience. Alvin Rose (1975) aptly summarized this:
It has been, of course, the magnificent insistence of Black students during this past decade that has forced higher education in America, however reluctantly, to begin to confront the horrendous silence of the school curriculum and classroom (at all levels—elementary, secondary and college) concerning the role of Blacks in the fabric of mankind. The consequences of this malignant neglect by American education have been (a) an adult white citizenry that has grossly misunderstood the American predicament—a misunderstanding that to a considerable degree is characterizable in the form of perceiving Blacks as pathologies to be cured, as deficits and deprivations to be repaired, as stains to be somehow washed white; and (b) an adult Black systematically deprecated, its African heritage cruelly ignored and unarticulated, its access to a fair share of contemporary scarce economic rewards and political instruments ingeniously withheld. (p. 1)
These highly political beginnings certainly distinguish the Africana Studies discipline from European disciplines, which developed, for the most part, at the turn of the 20th century, due to changes in the European intellectual and philosophical landscape in the 19th century, especially as a result of the rise of scientism. Thus, as Talmadge Anderson (1990) correctly remarks,
The dramatic emergence and institution of Black Studies as an academic field at colleges and universities have few if any parallels in the history of American education. As a branch of knowledge, Black Studies in the United States does not attribute its origin to any European scientific theorist or philosopher of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as in the cases of the “traditional” disciplines. (p. 1)
Yet a correct appreciation of the challenges facing the discipline of Africana Studies requires a preliminary understanding of the nature of the American academy, for that is where Africana Studies proceeded to create its own niche. In that respect, the work of Western sociologists of disciplines is useful. The dominant metaphor here is a spatial, and sometimes belligerent, one, with disciplines said to literally fight over turf and resources, to establish and protect their own space and borders from alien encroachments. Thus, and unsurprisingly, it appears rather clearly that, like any new discipline in the American academy, Africana Studies has also had to face what Camic and Xie (1994) refer to as “the new comer's dilemma” (p. 776), characterized by the need to meet two contradictory requirements, differentiation, and conformity. Differentiation implies the identification and demarcation of a discipline's space in the academic world, a process that equates with “boundary work”:
Boundary-work is performed for various purposes. When the point is to establish or protect a discipline, boundaries mark it as a territory to be possessed by its owners, not appropriated by others, and they indicate the relations it may have with other disciplines. When the point is to regulate disciplinary practitioners, boundary-work determines which methods and theories are included, which should be excluded, and which may be imported. (Shumway & Messer-Davidow, 1991, p.
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