The State of the Discipline: A Selective and Personal Appraisal by Molefi Kete Asante, Ph.D. Full Professor and Chair Department of Africology Temple University
Nathan Hare, the eminent founder of the first serious Black studies program at San Francisco State University, warned in 1975 that we were allowing the discipline to slip from our grip. Hare understood that no discipline, no matter the strength of conviction shown by its votarists, can be sustained if it allows others to define it, describe its purpose, establish its limits, or create its warrants. A few months ago, I was invited to speak about Afrocentricity and African development by the Russian Academy of Sciences and their African Studies program. What was clear to me, especially as an Africologist—one who truly believes that we have a discipline and not merely an aggregation of courses about African people—was the intense interest of the Russians in understanding the foundation of our research and teaching in Africology. Hare’s caution has become my caution in the sense that I am curious about what people, other than Africologists, see in what we do. I met people with whom I am maintaining a current dialogue, such as Nadya Kholkhokova, who has written a book on Afrocentricity, and Dmitri Bondarenko, who studies African urban communities in North America. Kholkhokova and Bondarenko, among other Russians, are monitoring as best they can through the Internet the work that we are doing in Africology. They know the debates that we have had about the nature of our struggle to hold our place in the vocabulary of theory. We have not been laggards in any regard when it comes to the production of scholarship in books and articles. Yet to truly establish a discipline, there must be a cadre of individuals who are willing to take the methodological and conceptual leads to do research, using the tools that have been given by our scholars to bring into existence new knowledge. I can at least speak of the frontiers we are pushing at Temple University in Afrofuturism and comparative African cultural studies as well as in Kemetic examinations of values. If we do not do this—that is, take the lead—we are likely to repeat the old worn ideas that have been circulating in the “traditional” disciplines for a hundred years. How can we be interdisciplinary when the “traditional” disciplines are based on the hierarchical race paradigm? Of course, we have many interests: music, social institutions, 193
