Black Transnationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century

Abstract

I would like to thank Tukufu Zuberi and the staff and faculty of the Africana Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to participate in their 30th-anniversary commemoration of African American Studies. The name change of the department is emblematic in some ways of the shifts among the constellation of departments and programs focusing on the study of African-descended populations across spatial, temporal, linguistic, cultural, and historical boundaries that do not always correspond to the borders of nation-states nor to the borders of academic disciplines. Africana and African American studies have played a unique role in the U.S. academy. Foisted on many institutions of higher learning in the United States due to the struggles and gains of civil rights and Black nationalism, African American studies, lest we forget, was often treated as the child of an illicit relationship between social struggle and the conventional disciplines. Its existence in many ways highlighted both the importance of political struggle and alternative intellectual traditions to the development of African American studies and Africana studies and interdisciplinary departments and programs. At elite U.S. academic institutions, African American studies departments often lurked in basements and neglected buildings on the spatial and administrative margins of many well-endowed research institutions.