scholarly journals Building intellectual bridges: from African studies and African American studies to Africana studies in the United States

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Africana Studies

The study of Africa and its peoples in the United States has a complex history. It has involved the study of both an external and internal other, of social realities in Africa and the condition of people of African descent in the United States. This paper traces and examines the complex intellectual, institutional, and ideological histories and intersections of African studies and African American studies. It argues that the two fields were founded by African American scholar activists as part of a Pan-African project before their divergence in the historically white universities after World War II in the maelstrom of decolonization in Africa and civil rights struggles in the United States. However, from the late 1980s and 1990s, the two elds began to converge, a process captured in the development of what has been called Africana studies. The factors behind this are attributed to both demographic shifts in American society and the academy including increased African migrations in general and of African academics in particular fleeing structural adjustment programs that devastated African universities, as well as the emergence of new scholarly paradigms especially the field of diaspora studies. The paper concludes with an examination of the likely impact of the Obama era on Africana studies. Key words: African studies, African American studies, African diaspora studies, Africana studies 

scholarly journals Building intellectual bridges: from African studies and African American studies to Africana studies in the United States

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-31
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Africana Studies

The study of Africa and its peoples in the United States has a complex history. It has involved the study of both an external and internal other, of social realities in Africa and the condition of people• of African descent in the United States. This paper traces and examines the complex intellectual, institutional, and ideological histories and intersections of African studies and African American studies. It argues that the two fields were founded by African American scholar activists as part of a Pan-African project before their divergence in the historically white universities after World War II in the maelstrom of decolonization in Africa and civil rights struggles in the United States. However, from the late 1980s and 1990s, the two fields began to converge, a process captured in the development of what has been called Africana studies. The factors behind this are attributed to both demographic shifts in American society and the academy including increased African migrations in general and of African academics in particular fleeing structural adjustment programs that devastated African universities, as well as the emergence of new scholarly paradigms especially the field of diaspora studies. The paper concludes with an examination of the likely impact of the Obama era on Africana studies.

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.

The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows

F.B. Eyes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
The Mind

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945–1965

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 784-810
Author(s):  
Malia McAndrew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
Black Beauty ◽  
At Home

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

The Development of African Studies in the United States

1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Carol A. Dressel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Junior College ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Studies ◽  
African Religions ◽  
African Languages ◽  
College Curriculum ◽  
Carnegie Corporation ◽  
Available Information

The earliest interest in Africa among institutions of higher education in the United States was probably that of denominational colleges which trained missionaries for Africa and other areas. But their motivation was to bring the fruits of Western civilization to non-Western areas, and this had no effect on the college curriculum of the nineteenth century. The missionary interest has continued in at least one major African studies program. The Hartford Seminary Foundation offers courses on missionary problems, African religions, and Christianity in Africa. It also teaches several African languages. Northwestern University has had an interest in African anthropology which dates back to 1927. No available information, however, has revealed whether courses then offered included the study of Africa. During World War II, there was an abortive attempt to organize an International Conference on Africa, and just after the war, an instructor at Colby Junior College included the study of African literature in an English course. The Carnegie Corporation aided the development of African studies by extending their grants for area studies to the African field, giving funds for fellowships and sending small groups of scholars to Africa for “look-see” tours. Superficial as these tours may have been, a number of their participants later became Africanists.

Americanists in Unexpected Places

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”

scholarly journals Foreword

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Allen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
First Generation ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
World War ◽  
Undergraduate Study ◽  
Vice Chancellor

It is a pleasure to have been asked to write a brief introduction to this Jubilee edition of the Journal of American Studies, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the British Association for American Studies, whose first Chairman and prime mover was the seminal scholar and teacher, Frank Thistlethwaite, my present Vice-Chancellor and old friend. The edition takes the interesting form of seven academic autobiographies written by distinguished European Americanist scholars, telling us in effect how they became involved in American Studies.The fairly restricted number of first-generation European Americanists in the post World War II era (which is in fact almost to say simply the first generation) is shown by die circumstance that, with the exception of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, I know them all and most of diem very well. I am perhaps favourably, because centrally, placed to introduce them since three are my seniors and four my juniors. Of my seniors all three had set out on the path that was to lead them to the study of the United States before the war began, but all three, I think it fair to say, even including much the most senior of us, Dietrich Gerhard, only decisively became Americanists as a result of die war itself.This corresponds with my own experience, though I suspect that I might have become one in any case: I was perhaps die only member of the pre-war generation among die contributors to have made a serious undergraduate study of die United States (in that splendid special subject at Oxford, The American Revolution and, I think it is accurate to add, the Maying of the Constitution, which Herbert Nicholas describes) under the magic yet far from invisible hand of Denis Brogan, the father or grandfather of us all in Britain and elsewhere.

Epilogue

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 261-262
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Short Period ◽  
And Function

This epilogue reemphasizes the arguments in the book. Brown-skin models acquired significant social status as African American women on an expanded global stage between 1945 and 1954—a short but critical period that marked the end of World War II, the hardening lines of Cold War politics, and the significant victory of Brown v. Board of Education that, in 1954, made segregation illegal in public schools. Indeed, during this short period and turning tide, a powerful iconography of beautiful brown women emerged to represent African-descended people in the United States by recasting beauty as a democratic right and function. Brown beauty was formalized, both at home and abroad, as a consumerist symbol of women’s successful negotiation of the trials of race, sex, and womanhood in the postwar nation, still half-segregated.

Minoritized Criticism of the New Testament

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tat-siong Benny Liew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Biblical Texts

Minoritized criticism of the New Testament refers generally to academic and critical interpretations of biblical texts by people of color in the United States of America, where they are often called “minorities.” The word “minoritized” signifies that the issue in question is less about number but more about power, as minoritization is a state-sanctioned and ideologically supported process—including using the Bible for justification—of racialization and marginalization against particular persons or communities because of their race/ethnicity and their migration history. With the civil rights movement and James Cone’s development of black liberation theology in the late 1960s, African American biblical scholars began to protest white supremacy by highlighting racial/ethnic relations and tensions in biblical writings and by making their biblical interpretation explicitly contextual to their communities’ histories, experiences, and concerns. Since then, with the model provided by their black colleagues and the emphasis on “social location” within biblical studies, Asian American and Latinx American scholars have also developed their respective hermeneutics to challenge racial discrimination and address issues of identity, representation, inclusion, exclusion, exploitation, oppression, and resistance, among others, both in the biblical texts that they read and in the contemporary situations that their communities face. Given this criticism’s concern with minoritized communities, practitioners often engage African American studies, Asian American studies, or Latinx American studies to inform their work. Because of minoritization’s connection with migration and its dynamics as a form of internal colonialism, there are also often overlaps between minoritized criticism and postcolonial criticism of the New Testament. While minoritized criticism started with a focus on race/ethnicity, subsequent works, upon acknowledgment that there are other identity factors besides race (such as gender, class, sexuality) and recognition that race and other identity factors are often mutually co-constitutive, have been giving greater emphasis on diversities and keener attention to intersectional realities within each minoritized community. Recently, there is a move to understand minoritized criticism as work that engages across racially/ethically minoritized communities (as opposed to scholarship that works exclusively within a critic’s own minoritized community). This understanding emphasizes the reality that minoritized groups are racialized not in isolation but in relation to one another, and the need to decenter whiteness by prioritizing critics of other minoritized communities as one’s interlocutors. Since minoritization as a result of migration may take place in various countries, minoritized criticism of the New Testament can also be practiced and developed outside of the United States.

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