The Changing Terrain of African Studies
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Recently, I published a two-volume collection of essays on The Study of Africa Volume 1: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters; Volume 2: Global and Transnational Engagements, which forms the basis of my reflections on the changing terrain of African Studies, and speculations of where the field might be in, say, 2020. Let me hasten to add that as historian I am uncomfortable crystal gazing into the future since trying to understand the past and the present is complicated enough, so you will forgive me if my remarks are weighted more to the current state of affairs. In discussing African Studies or any field for that matter, it is important to note that the economies and cultures of knowledge production are an integral part of complex and sometimes contradictory, but always changing, institutional, intellectual and ideological processes and practices that occur, simultaneously, at national and transnational, or local and global levels. This is simply to point out that African Studies—the production of African/ist knowledges—has concrete and conceptual, material and moral, political and discursive contexts, which create the variations that are so evident across the world and across disciplines.

Today, African Studies is a vast international enterprise. Half a century ago, there were few institutions of higher education whether in Africa itself or abroad that took the study of Africa seriously. Despite all the noises we hear about the crisis of African universities in general or African Studies in particular (both true), there can be little doubt that thousands of people all over the world in multitudes of institutions earn their living teaching, researching, writing, or even celebrating and condemning Africa, in a way that would have been unimaginable at the end of the Second World War when Africa was still under colonial rule. And countless books, journals, reviews, and reference works are published on Africa in dozens of languages across virtually all the fields of academic inquiry. It is practically impossible now for any one individual, however prodigious, to read all that is produced in any discipline or area of specialization in African Studies as may have been the case forty or even thirty years ago.

African Studies is both disciplinary and interdisciplinary in the sense that Africa is studied in specific disciplines and through disciplinary paradigms and in interdisciplines and through interdisciplinary paradigms. This duality reflects the very duality, or rather complexity, of the modern scholarly enterprise. The academy in much of the world is typically divided into disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. But the institutional and intellectual boundaries between the two are neither always clear nor uniform across universities let alone across countries. In fact, the origins, definitions, and trajectories of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are often confused and contested. Interdisciplinarity is seen either as an unwelcome interloper or the savior of the disciplines. It tends to be assumed that, for better or for worse, interdisciplinarity is a recent phenomenon. In reality, the two have existed in dialectical tension – and the dynamics of their interaction have changed – ever since the emergence of the modern research university in the nineteenth century, which laid the architecture of contemporary knowledge production and consumption. Notwithstanding the passions with which the gatekeepers often guard their disciplinary boundaries, duly fortified with internal legitimating histories, it is evident that both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are not static phenomena, but changing epistemic constructions that evolve as part of the continuous transformations in the nature and function of the academy, which in turn, reflect the changing dynamics in the wider society and the wider world.

In their encounters with Africa, the disciplines have traveled a considerable distance from their unadulterated Eurocentric origins, but many traces remain which continue to envelope Africa in the analytical shadows of difference and even derision. Eurocentricism is rooted in the very origins of the Enlightenment project and its unyielding hierarchical geographies of knowledge. We all know the role of anthropology in the construction of African exceptionalism, in the racialization of Africa and the struggles the discipline has waged since the anti-colonial wrath of decolonization to liberate itself from colonial complicity. At the height of empire anthropology was of course not the only discipline that sought to exonerate colonialism from the cultural, cartographic, and cognitive violence it wrought on Africa, there were other disciplines from literature to history to psychology.

Not surprisingly, one of the dominant features of African Studies and scholarship since independence has been the deconstructive impulse to dismantle the hegemony of European thought as part of the struggle to reconstruct the historicity and integrity of African thought, to affirm African humanity long denied by the European geopolitical self and the metaphysics of white normativity. Clearly, African and Africanist scholars have been preoccupied with the need to decolonize African Studies, to renegotiate the epistemic terms of knowledge production, to rid the disciplines and interdisciplines of the civilizational and cognitive conceits of Europe and Eurocentricism. Obviously some disciplines have been more successful than others, the humanities such as history and literature more successful than the social sciences like economics and political science.

Whatever the differences, the strong deconstructive imperatives of African/ist scholarship partly account for the interdisciplinary tendencies of African Studies. In other words, the insurgency of African Studies, together with the other so-called area studies in the academies of the global North, have been critical to the decomposition of the western epistemological order, the paradigmatic disorder that has been so evident over the past few decades, which is often attributed, incorrectly in my view, to the belated rise of the ‘posts’—postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcoloniality. The interdisciplinary inclinations of African Studies can also be attributed to intellectual necessity, the need to construct an African ‘library’, a body of knowledge that can fully encompass, engage, and examine African phenomena. When this drive began in earnest in the postwar era the existing disciplinary methodologies and theories were found seriously wanting. There is hardly a discipline that was not forced to reformulate its concepts and methods in the endeavor to excavate and elevate Africa from the onerous weight of Eurocentric epistemology.