African American History

Journal of Social Issues, 1973

This paper presents an overview of the major intellectual forces affecting black scholars in the past and an outline of what will occur in the future. The role of the white researcher is discussed in relationship to the concept of scientific objectivity, with an illustration of how the very concepts employed by researchers ("integration" versus "liberation") channel their energies in one direction as opposed to another. Discussion of black behavior is grounded in a consideration of African behavior. Black Americans are viewed as fundamentally African, not European; the difference between these two provides the legitimate epistemological foundation for a distinctive Black Studies.

Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, 1997

This chapter from Gupta and Ferguson (1997) explores the historiography of African Studies in the U.S. and argues that the field has been forged through the peculiar American institution of racism.

The Social Studies, 2010

This paper proposes that as a way to broaden the theoretical and historical context of social studies foundational literature and curriculum history, attention must be given to issues of race and racism related the experiences of African Americans. First, race and racism should be used as an analytical tool to examine longstanding foundations topics. Second, historically marginalized social studies scholars need to be recognized and theoretically situated within the existing literature of social studies foundations. Last, there must be comparative work that examines African American and White progressives' similar and divergent conceptions of K-12 social studies curriculum. As a way to address these limitations in the social studies foundations literature, this paper provides a comparative examination of the different ways in which Harold O. Rugg and Carter G. Woodson rendered race and racism in the textbooks they authored during the early twentieth century. This article concludes with a discussion about the implications of this study to social studies foundations scholarship.

2010

Front cover illustration: Covers of books about African American Studies. For full citations see references, page 14. 1. Black intellectual history, including ongoing research on the current state of Black Studies through surveys, case studies, comparative studies of other ethnic studies units, and so on 2. Interdisciplinary study of the Black American Experience 3. Global connections and diaspora dialogues 4. Application, that is, putting theory into practice, particularly through 5. Creative use of new technologies. Led by Professor Abdul Alkalimat, the production of this report has been an interesting and instructive collaboration among faculty members and students at the University of Illinois based in African American Studies, the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, and the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the College of Education. It represents a model not i only for collective research but how the intellectual resources of faculty and students in African American Studies-both graduate students and advanced undergraduates-could be rallied to produce more information that is valuable to the field as a whole. In 1968, the year before Black Studies was first established at the University of Illinois, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the research task of higher education in supporting the development of Black America. Referencing his own words from 1935, he said: "Instead of the occasional snapshots of [African American] social conditions which was the social study of yesterday, we must aim at a continuously moving picture of ever increasing range and accuracy" (Du Bois 1968, page 312). This report is just one response to his call.

Journal of African American Studies 16(1): 1-20 , 2012

With a beginning remarkably different than conventional academic disciplines, Black Studies emerged on the American college campus amidst Black Power protests and student demands. Now more than forty years old, Black Studies exists as an established discipline constituted by a robust scholarly discourse, an ever-expanding body of innovative interdisciplinary literature, hundreds of collegiate programs at the undergraduate level, a growing number of graduate and doctoral programs, and some of the world's most well-known intellectuals. This introduction-and special issue of the Journal of African American Studies-explores the origins and history of the Black Studies Movement in the United States. Our aim in this volume is to bring the political history to the forefront. Based on historical detail and deep archival research, the works ground the history of Black Studies in the radical Black politics of the late 1960s and 1970s, while emphasizing local materiality and ideological developments. The contributions in this special issue recover some of the names (and faces) of Black Studies' founders, offering a range of perspectives on the movement to establish the field both within and without the American academy.

American Literary History, 2002

In his 1925 essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," Arthur A. Schomburg characterizes previous publications on African-American history as being largely "compendiums of exceptional men and women of African stock" that were "on the whole pathetically over-corrective, ridiculously over-laudatory; it was apologetics turned into biography" (231). Arguing that "a true historical sense develops slowly and with difficulty under such circumstances" as those faced by earlier students of African-American achievement, Schomburg celebrated the fact that, by his day, history had become "less a matter of argument and more a matter of record" (231). But whatever a "true historical sense" might be, its development must still be underway, for it has yet to arrive. Indeed, African-American history, like all history, remains as much a matter of argument as a matter of record. One might note that "compendiums of exceptional men and women of African stock" still remain one of the primary popular genres of African-American writing; 1 but beyond the work of recovering and publicizing the lives and achievements of African Americans that is still necessitated by the relative absence of those achievements in the popular media and public consciousness, approaches to the scholarly "matter of record" itself remain a "matter of argument." Consider, for example, Wilson Jeremiah Moses's Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (1998), an attempt to recontextualize heated arguments over the nature, validity, and value of Afrocentrism as a scholarly framework. Moses reminds us that "a limitless range of opinion has been attached to the term Afrocentrism by authors across the political spectrum, most of whom are less interested in scholarly investigations of African American cultures and historical traditions than in forwarding myriad self-serving political agendas" (9). Moses here follows Schomburg, and the historical profession generally, in distinguish

Ufahamu, 2008

As an academic d iscipline, African studies in the United States has always had a precarious existence. Its relevance has ascended or declined in proportion to the strategic politicized and racialized value of Africa in US calculations. Befo re the formal institution of the first Afric an studies program at Northwestern University in 1948, efforts by African Ame rican scho lars to draw attentio n to African studies were consistent ly frustrated. Thi s was hard ly surp rising in a soc iety where black s and thei r A frican heritag e were den igrated un t il the C ivil Rights Movem ent of the 19605 launched a major struggle against blatant, official racism. Since the 1960s, however, interest in African stud ies fluctuated depending on the ex isting (inter)national, political, and ideological situa tio ns. Co ntin uing bicker ing amo ng Africanists (Whites and Blacks) over scholarly authority, authentic ity, and gate keep ing as well as the issues of paradigms, re leva nc e, biase s, bounda ri es, and ideol o g ica l and intellectual age ndas. further pol iticized and racia lized African studies. Thi s essay, therefore, is an appraisal of these challenges and how they impinge on the fortu ne of, and approac hes to, African studies in the United States.

This paper proposes that as a way to broaden the theoretical and historical context of social studies foundational literature and curriculum history, attention must be given to issues of race and racism related the experiences of African Americans. First, race and racism should be used as an analytical tool to examine longstanding foundations topics. Second, historically marginalized social studies scholars need to be recognized and theoretically situated within the existing literature of social studies foundations. Last, there must be comparative work that examines African American and White progressives' similar and divergent conceptions of K-12 social studies curriculum. As a way to address these limitations in the social studies foundations literature, this paper provides a comparative examination of the different ways in which Harold O. Rugg and Carter G. Woodson rendered race and racism in the textbooks they authored during the early twentieth century. This article conclud...