Black Transnationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century

Abstract

The renewed interest in diaspora studies, interdisciplinarity, and transnationalism has long been a feature of African American, Africana, and Black studies. African American studies combines two modalities of knowledge formation that have been common to Western academia throughout the 20th century; the disciplines (the categorization of the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities) and area or regional studies. It combines various methodologies, concepts, and theories of the social sciences and humanities to examine specific groups of people (African and African derived) from specific territories and regions of the world (Africa and the Americas). Its unusual intellectual foundations continue to be an advantage in relation to the conventional disciplines in terms of multi-method, multiperspectival approaches to African and African diaspora related topics. The debates about area studies and their relevance for social science research have not generated much commentary or debate within African American studies. Nevertheless, these debates have profound implications for the direction and future of African American studies as a discipline, its scholarly direction, and its relation to a world beyond the academy.