Creating New Knowledge: An African Digital Humanities by Peter Ukpokodu, Ph.D. Full Professor The University of Kansas Department of African & African-American Studies
Since its founding, Black studies as a discipline has always reinvigorated its epistemic raison d’etre with an infusion of sharp scholarship, insightful pedagogy, and altruistic cultural communal service. Its beginnings were bold and assertive, and the early founders of the discipline were unsurpassed in matching their vision with praxis. Black cultural affirmation and service to the community matched intellectual and didactic rigor and dedication, and both were pursued with unparalleled energy even at the risk of the founders’ academic self-immolation. It was a victorious revolution whose aftermath unleashed creative energies that could be linked to preceding or contemporaneous generation in which, for example, Maulana Karenga’s robust intellect and irrepressible spirit brought forth the immortal and inimitable Kwanzaa that is now recognized worldwide as it takes its place among cultural festivals and holidays, and the phenomenon now simply referred to as “Harlem’s Golden Age” or the “Harlem Renaissance” (Lewis, 1981, p. xi) also emerged. It is this spirit of always seeking to extend the intellectual and civic horizons of the Black experience that has continued to serve as the trampoline from which Black studies continues to leap to disciplinary excellence even as it rejuvenates itself. This is where the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas (KU) has made, and continues to make, solid disciplinary contributions. In an earlier decade, scholars from KU, among others, examined the state of Black studies and proposed areas for development in the 21st century. One of the strident calls in their publication African Studies for the 21st Century, edited by Gordon (2004), was for Black studies programs to seek departmental status that would provide them with a faculty core, especially at the undergraduate level, meaning their staff would be devoted to the discipline instead of representing a collection of faculty whose primary allegiance is to their non-Black-studies home departments where they are tenured and promoted, and where their salaries and merit pay increases are often determined (Gordon, 2004, pp. 83–93). As well-meaning as they might be in regard to the advancement of Black studies, that discipline would only be of secondary 182
