Naming Black Studies: Results From a Faculty Opinion Survey

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-366
Author(s):  
Nolan Kopkin ◽  
Erin N. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Market Pressure ◽  
The Ideal

The ongoing debate about nomenclature has been part of the discourse in Black Studies since the late 1960s, yet there remains no consensus on an ideal name. The existing literature ties specific name choices to political, ideological, and paradigmatic approach; regional focus; and/or institutional and market pressure. In this study, we augment the literature with survey data on the opinions of Black Studies scholars. Our findings show “Africana Studies” is most often chosen as the ideal name, followed by “Black Studies,” “African Diaspora Studies,” “African American Studies” and “Pan-African Studies,” “Africology,” and “African Studies,” and that trends for positive and negative connotations follow a somewhat similar pattern. Just as the literature ties specific name choices to political, ideological, and paradigmatic approach; regional focus; and/or institutional and market pressure, so too do our respondents. It is our hope these results add to the ongoing scholarly discussion around nomenclature in Black Studies.

Humanism and the Human

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Winters
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Working Through ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

This chapter engages humanism and its fundamental assumptions by working through critical theory, black feminism, and black studies. It contends that there is a tension at the heart of humanism—while the ideal human appears to be the most widespread and available category, it has been constructed over and against certain qualities, beings, and threats. To elaborate on this tension, this chapter revisits the work of authors like Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. Marx acknowledges that the human is a site of conflict and antagonism even as his thought betrays a lingering commitment to progress and humanism. Foucault goes further than Marx by underscoring the fabricated quality of man and the ways in which racism functions to draw lines between those who must live and those who must die. In response to Marx and Foucault’s tendency to privilege Europe, this chapter engages black feminism and Afro-pessimism—Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Frank Wilderson—who show how the figure of the human within humanism is defined in opposition to blackness.

Romancing the Stone: Academe’s Illusive Template for African Diaspora Studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Melina Pappademos
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
North Americans ◽  
History Of ◽  
America South ◽  
Research Plan ◽  
The Caribbean

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.

Pan-African Chronology: A Comprehensive Reference to the Black Quest for Freedom in Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia, 1400–1865. By EVERETT JENKINS, JR. North Carolina: McFarland, 1996. Pp. viii + 440. £44.95 (ISBN 0- 7864-0139-7).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
HAKIM ADI
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Comprehensive Index ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Comprehensive Reference

Everett Jenkins' book is an admirable attempt to present a comparative chronology of events in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. The volume is divided into five principal chapters, corresponding to the five centuries covered, each preceded by a brief introduction, and includes a short bibliography and guide to sources, as well as an extensive and comprehensive index. In addition to sections on Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, the author also includes useful sections on ‘related historical events’.

African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank “Trey” Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Old World ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Catchment Areas ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This chapter examines the intersections of race, ethnicity, and slavery in Spanish America and the African Diaspora by focusing on the development of African Diasporic ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650. Drawing on marriage records from early seventeenth-century Mexico City, it considers how Africans constructed multiple new ethnic and community identities in Spanish America. Through an analysis of selection patterns of testigos (wedding witnesses) alongside marriage choice, the chapter highlights the networks of social relations formed by slaves. It shows that ethnic Africans tended to marry and form communities of association with Africans from the same general catchment areas. It argues that the foundations of the ethnic communities under formation were not intact African ethnicities, pan-African identities, or race-based identities. Rather, slave marriages in Mexico City point to the creation of African diasporic ethnicities that were spontaneously articulated in the Diaspora. Africans formed new ethnic identities based upon Old World backgrounds and commonalities while in Diaspora.

Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Biondi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Colleges ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of

The forty-year history of African American studies has led some scholars to take stock of its roots and its future. This essay examines the field's unexpected origins in black colleges, as well as at predominantly white ones, and assesses the early debates and challenges along the road to academic incorporation. Biondi takes up such questions as: Did the field's origins in the Black Power movement jeopardize its claims to academic legitimacy? If black studies is a discipline, what is its methodology? As an outgrowth of black nationalism on campus, to what extent was black studies U.S.-centric? How did the field relate to the rise of diaspora studies and black feminism? Who takes black studies classes and to what extent does the field retain a political mission? The essay concludes that African American studies remains a vital and dynamic field as it moves into the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Translating Wor(l)ds

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African Studies ◽  
North African ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Practical Research ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
East Asian Studies ◽  
Asian Languages ◽  
Research Domains

The book series, sponsored by the Department of Asian and North African Studies, aims to give voice to a time-honoured branch of theoretical and practical research across the disciplines and research domains within the Department. The series aims to establish a platform for scholarly discussion and a space for international dialogue on the translation of Asian and North African languages. In doing so, the project aims to observe and verify the translingual and transcultural dynamics triggered by translation from and into said ‘languages-cultures’, as well as to identify and explore the deep cultural mechanisms and structures involved in interethnic behaviours and relationships. Translation is also a major research tool in the humanities. As a matter of fact, a hermeneutic potential in terms of cultural mediation is inherent in translation activities and in the reflection on translation: it is precisely this potential that allows scholars, in both their research and dissemination work, to bring to the surface the interethnic and intercultural dynamics regulating the relationships between civilisations, both diachronically and synchronically. The project is a continuation and a development of the research carried out in recent years by the former Department of East Asian Studies – now Department of Asian and North African Studies – of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice through a series of initiatives organised by the research group on the translation of Asian languages “Laboratorio sulla Traduzione delle Lingue orientali” (http://www.unive.it/pag/17031/). Such activities involved periodical meetings on translation, whose objective was to introduce and discuss specific issues in translation from and into Asian languages, as well as several international events (workshops, conferences, and symposia).

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