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Questioning the Diaspora: Hegemony, Black Intellectuals and Doing International History from Below

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Lisa Brock
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Extract

The recent debates among scholars on hegemony and race in African Studies are very exciting. Realities that African-American intellectuals know quite well—that there was a Black tradition of scholarship on Africa in the Americas long before 1948 and that peoples of African descent have been marginalized within the African Studies establishment—are finally getting a much needed airing. Although some of the opinions, such as those expressed by Phillip Curtin in the Chronicle are difficult to swallow and no doubt the cause of great unease, many of us are not surprised and are in fact elated. Silences on issues of racism are never golden, only a resolve to expose and fight them are.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , 1996 , pp. 9 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996 

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Footnotes

*

Lisa Brock is an Associate Professor of African History and Diaspora Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently chair of the Department of Liberal Arts and is co-editor of a work on African-American and Cuban relations before the Cuban Revolution forthcoming from Temple University Press in 1997.

References

Notes

1. But even Guyer’s, Jane recent African Studies in the United States: A Perspective, African Studies Association Press, 1996 Google Scholar, largely ignores the work of early African-American scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, and Arturo Schomburg. Her periodization of the field of African Studies begins with the post WW II era, the period when predominantly white institutions of higher learning began to study Africa. The period before this was predominantly led by African-American intellectuals. For a critique of some of the ways the African perspectives are subverted through publishing see Yankah, Kwesi, “Displaced Academies and the Quest for a New World Academic Order,” Africa Today, vol 42, number 3, Summer 1995, pp. 7-26Google Scholar. Marginalization of the Black voice has not been unique to African Studies. Earl Lewis historicizes the problem in African-American Studies. See Lewis, Earl, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, volume 100, June, 1995, pp. 765-87Google Scholar.

2. I include the plural indicators to show that there has never been one African-American view or vision of African Studies but many. Yet, given the history of racism, discrimination and lack of attention to black history, these perspectives have enough similar characteristics to be commonly grouped. I also enjoin “their/our” to highlight the way that one always writes from a certain positionality. I am African-American but find myself inclined to write about African-American scholars as if from the outside because it is the way I was socialized.

3. Alpers, Edward, “Reflections on the Studying and Teaching about Africa in America,” Issue, Volume XXIII/I 1995, p. 9 Google Scholar.

4. West, Michael and Martin, Bill, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Issue, Volume XXIII/I 1995, p. 3 Google Scholar.

5. Alpers, p. 9.

5. Alpers, p. 9.

6. When I use the term “African American” without a hyphen, I do so to indicate all peoples of African descent in the Americas.

7. Guyer, Jane, “African Studies: A New Tradition,” Issue, Volume XXIII/I 1995, p. 13 Google Scholar.

8. From research undertaken earlier on Mozambique, I discovered that during the latter nineteenth century a large group of Mozambicans seized by a ship in the British anti-slave squadron were not taken home but taken to Panama to work as “free” laborers on the canal. The quotes designate the title of a book by Conniff, Michael, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama 1904-1981, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985 Google Scholar.