A Future with a Past: Resurrecting the Study of Africa in the Post-Africanist Era

Abstract

Our thesis may be simply stated: African Studies as it has been practiced in the United States for almost half a century is now grievously wounded.1 Africanists' life support is being removed as the production of knowledge changes to suit a reconfigured global order. The passing of the Africanist enterprise is, however, no cause for mourning; the study of Africa preceded institutionalized African Studies and will certainly survive it. Indeed there is potentially a far better future ahead, one that recaptures the best of the pre-Africanist past while it engages new transcontinental trends in contemporary intellectual and cultural life. Powerful and senior Africanists offer, of course, a radically different reading of the current conjuncture. Doomsday predictions, they counter, are highly exaggerated and almost as old as African Studies itself. Far from portending an inexorable crisis, they believe the present dilemma is merely the latest downturn in a familiar cycle, and they calmly forecast a brighter tomorrow. From this perspective there is little alternative or threat to the essential elements of the Africanist enterprise, construed as a teaching and research endeavor focused on sub-Saharan Africa; organized by extradisciplinary research programs; dominated by faculty and staff at Historically White Universities (HWUs); and funded by ties to private foundations and public agencies. We would concede that this construction is not entirely without merit. African Studies has indeed demonstrated an uncanny ability for self-preservation over the last half-century, surviving the buffeting of numerous financial, ideological, and political storms. When external financial constraints have appeared, Africanists have found new sources of funding; when internal insurgents have coalesced, they have managed to incorporate or sidestep them. This resiliency is not, however, without its limits. In the past, successful defensive actions have rested on stability in the post-World War II network that created and supported Area and African Studies. This, it seems to us, is now dissolving. Gone are the Cold War and the geostrate