African Cultural Studies: An Overview

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay we draw on close to 100 journal essays and books to produce a necessarily partial and subjective survey of contemporary African cultural studies. Any such survey ought to take into account the politics of representation broadly conceptualized and in this case representation largely constitutes the survey. We made choices about identities and identification, space and place and the confluence of these factors in the articulation of African cultural studies. In terms of identity, we take up Blackness as the hegemonic (and hence not exclusive) racial identity and identification of African cultural studies and address gender and sexuality issues specifically through the exposition of African feminisms, womanisms and queer thought and politics. In terms of spatiality we take a stance on the exclusive continental versus continuity conception Africa: we treat the African diaspora as contributory and its relationship to the continent as a problematic, while taking up continental Africa as the principal location of African cultural studies. On the continent we address the principal themes that characterize West, East, North and Southern African cultural studies. We identify journals, programs of study and the work of academics and cultural workers on the continent and in the diaspora as contributory to the articulation and disciplining of African cultural studies. African cultural studies in sum is an articulation that holds in tension Afropolitanism and Afropessimism, exclusive regional constituted continental and Black Atlantic, Pan-African, Afrocentric continental plus diasporic conception; beyond specifically African conceptions of gender, queer identity and identification are emergent as particularly important. African cultural studies is both a viable alternative to African area studies and an underrepresented, even largely ignored potential contributory discourse to global(ized) cultural studies.