Mamadou Diouf and the Spaces of History:
Random Reflections
Abosede George
Even though this is a palaver among historians, Moses and Mamadou’s exchange about a more explicitly interdisciplinary area of knowledge, African Studies, was actually most interesting to me. Particularly for the way it seeks to escape essentialist and colonial ideas of Africa by referring back to the somewhat forgotten writings (at least in African Studies circles) of African American intellectuals to locate the possibility of a dynamic and permanently self-reinventing idea of Africa. Certainly in African Diaspora Studies, Africana Studies, African-American or even Atlantic Studies programs, Du Bois and his students are centrally involved in the mediation of ideas of Africa. What is new is bringing Du Bois into the Africanist universe and in so doing clasping an arm that has been extended from the African Diaspora world in recent years.
As Pius pointed out in the last issue, Ato is now housed in a transregional studies field. So is Pius, so am I, and many other trained Africanists who have been brought into Africana Studies or Diaspora Studies programs. My position is probably the most common type- I have one foot in a traditional discipline: History, where I function as an Africanist but I also have another foot in an interdisciplinary program: Africana Studies where the faculty, from our different regional and disciplinary positions of comfort, are ostensibly engaged in a global intellectual and political enterprise. While the joint appointment system has its problems and the mushrooming number of positions that follow this design may be more a reflection of administrative expediency than anything else, there is still something remarkable afoot and the undeniable fact is that this remarkable development has been instigated by the diaspora studies community. A clear change seems to be afoot for Diaspora Studies as more and more undergraduate programs are reconceptualizing themselves as Africana Studies programs. The new nomenclature signifies the substantive incorporation of continental Africa into the realm of knowledge of programs that were formerly primarily concerned with the study of blacks in the Americas. At the graduate level, the Africana Studies departments at Cornell and CUNY are the only names that come to mind when I try to count the number of programs currently producing PhDs with the training to fully and simultaneously inhabit both the African Studies and African Diaspora Studies worlds. There are certainly growth possibilities there too.
What do these developments portend for African Studies? The boom in the new African diaspora population, coupled with its self-conscious presentation as such, poses a geographic challenge for African Studies that though always present in other forms was not taking as seriously in the past as it is now. What some see as the incursion of African Diaspora Studies onto African Studies turf also poses undeferrable questions. So what are the productive possibilities for African Studies? One possibility, which in some ways takes us back to the role of the scholar by expanding it to ask about the function of a field, was brought up when Mamadou, paraphrasing Du Bois, refers to the paradoxical political consequences of the upgrading of African Studies to an academic field. What followed was “the displacing of ‘black activism’- and activists- from its content and operations.” Du Bois was right. Interdisciplinary fields have always hung together on the basis of some overarching activist mission and the time should be past when political content is understood to somehow compromise the intellectual integrity of fields of study.
Paul’s survey of African Studies cultures around the world and what we glean of Mamadou’s experience of the various African Studies cultures on the continent through CODESRIA suggests to me that the decoupling of scholarship and materialist agendas that befell African Studies in the US is not generalizable across the board. While Mamadou throws the comment out into the world and then leaves it, moving on to other things, I wonder if perhaps Moses and Mamadou do not share more on their views of the role of the scholar and the academy in contemporary African public cultures than first meets the eye. Certainly, African feminist intellectuals, most notably those that have come together around UCT’s African Gender Institute Initiative have made strong calls for a more engaged professoriate. If the development of new civilities and civic communities on African political landscapes is made possible in part by educated African women, then it can only be in the interest of the African Studies field to attend to the calls and critiques being made by African feminist intellectuals.