ASANTE, PH.D

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,

languages, politics, ethics, and so forth, but we must see that any tradition that views Africans as inferior cannot be integrated into by a robust intellectual discipline such as Africology. We embody a critique of hierarchy and patriarchy because those ideas betrayed the original liberal arts that came out of African culture. Our discipline must be different because it is grounded in Afrocentric theory without a search for vulgar careerism that is rewarded by the controllers of Eurocentric or Arabo-centric ideologies. The search for unity in the discourse surrounding our origin as a discipline was greatly advanced in the 1980s during the same time when we were trying to distinguish what we did from Marxist sociology. Sometimes the Marxist sociologists won the battle of determining the nature of the field at certain universities, and at other institutions, the struggle was won by those who held the view that our perspective on data had to be examined from our own historical and cultural experiences. This problem was raised in the l980s, when Winston Van Horne suggested that my term “Afrology,” which appeared in the book Afrocentricity, should be “Africology ” and held a series of conferences at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where Maulana Karenga, Asa Hilliard, and myself were major contributors, in order to create the discipline. He gave us the term and then implemented this decision by changing the name of the department at Wisconsin. Eastern Michigan University, under the leadership of Victor Okafor, also changed the name of that department. Unfortunately, Milwaukee regressed in the past few years, threw out the history of advancement under Winston Van Horne, and went back to a less definitive name for its department. On the other hand, Temple, which had regretted the fact that we did not implement the name earlier, was able to move to Africology. While naming is important, a discipline also needs ideas, concepts, strategies, journals, intellectual debate, seminars, and symposia. I think that origin and concepts are central problems in our conversation. One can say that W.E.B. Du Bois is the founder of urban sociology with a statistical base; one can say sociology was invented at least twice—once in the middle of the 19th century by Auguste Comte, who gave the discipline its name by combining the Latin term societas with the Greek logos, and once, half a century later, by Emile Durkheim. The reason sociologists claim Durkheim is because in 1893, the Parisian was the first to produce a major sociological work employing a rigorously scientific methodology. People who tried to do that afterward were called sociologists. Political science claims to have its origins in Greece with Plato, or in the 15th century with Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (Il Principe). The ancient Africans recognized the oldest of disciplines, such as geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, agriculture, rhetoric, law, physics, physiology, and chemistry. The debasement of the African originals of these disciplines led Europe to alchemy, wherein they sought to achieve transmutation of base metals into gold or discover the elixir for eternal life. Technically, the alchemists wanted three things: to discover the source of eternal health and life, to find the stone of knowledge, and to discover the means of enacting transmutation of metals. They conducted their search through magic, the occult, and other forms of taking the ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary. At this moment, I believe that Africology, the Afrocentric study of African phenomena transgenerationally and transcontinentally, is at the stage of breaking the lock on our field that has been held by several degrees of alchemy. What do I mean by this type of talk? Our discipline is characterized by how we study and teach African phenomena. I use the word Afrocentricity. This is not a narrow term; it is an orientation to data, and since the data we examine are about people of African descent, we must place African people at the core of our study. We are not looking at Africans as objects of European history, sociology, or literary criticism; we are thrusting Africa forth in its own right and with its own integrity. To be Afrocentric is to see the

African origin of Homo sapiens and the African origin of civilization as basic starting points of our discourses. Without embracing that reality, what are we talking about? To be transgenerational is to cross all generations and to look at BCE and CE; to be transcontinental is to study Africans in South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, and North America. I suggest that having a discipline is impossible without certain clear characteristics founded on rational principles. It cannot be founded in the mere modification of the old, nor in the extension of imitation with new names of that which has gone before. To say that we are now at the point of speaking of the state of our discipline means that we have gone through the elements of cultivating a field of study. What is the difference between a field of study and a discipline of study? I have always believed that a field of study was a broader category than a discipline. For example, humanities is a field, but history is a discipline. One could also speak of natural sciences as a field and physics or biology as disciplines. Our problem is not one of simple nomenclature. We could call our area of study Africology, Africana studies, African American studies, Pan African studies or Black studies. That does not trouble me as much as the practice of doing the study bothers me. What does doing Black studies look like? What does doing Africana studies look like? Answering these questions has long plagued Africology. I was one of the students who helped to bring this area of study into existence at UCLA between 1966 and 1968. To answer the question of the state of Black studies, one must ask, what were we fighting for in the l960s? Once we know what we were fighting for at the origin, we can see where we are now and what adjustments we ought to make. I am afraid that we have not lived up to our expectations, nor to the speculative wishes of our creators who wanted to see a distinct, assertive discipline utilizing the tools based on African knowledge, customs, traditions, and information. I wrote a paper in the early l970s about analysis from a Black perspective, which was a cultural rather than a racial examination of knowledge. Racial analysis of African people had been the purview of some white scientists and scholars, looking at African brains and sexual organs, teeth and feet, to make conclusions about African people. Our idea was that by virtue of our cultural experiences, living together and understanding reality in a particular way, our responses would be different from those of white people’s culture; therefore, we needed to see from a different perspective. It is out of this knowledge and desire that we eventually organized the warrants for a discipline. To create the first doctoral program in 1988, I had to reflect on these issues in unprecedented ways. I sought to develop a Ph.D. program, not simply an aggregation of courses taught by Black people or liberal whites, and not an undergraduate program, and that meant Africology could not be history-light, or sociology-light, or Eurocentric literary theory in blackface. I had to spend time thinking about what it meant to study something from “a Black perspective.” I had to support the uniqueness of our perspective, wherein we were subjects of our narratives and discourses, and not imitations of Eurocentric assumptions; in fact, Africology had to be a critique on Eurocentric understandings of society, humanity, economics, and spirituality. Our discipline is not an attachment to anthropology, history, English, or political science. If we do not continue to construct our discipline along an Afrocentric path, we might soon discover that some universities might, because of misinformation, assume that sociology might take over departments that are simply Marxist studies of African communities, or history departments might try to herd African American history courses taught by Africologists into history departments by arguing that it is the same practice. Of course, it is not, because in an Africology

department, our interest in historical issues places African people, events, and culture at the core of our analysis. From what I can see at this moment through curricular evaluations, which entails reading the catalogs and bulletins of programs online, is that we still have faculty members who teach about African people from the same disciplinary base as their highest degrees. What I see is that those with degrees in political science, psychology, sociology, communication, or history often revert to their “traditional” training. It is difficult to commit discipline suicide from those old traditions, because then you would really have to think about how you should approach various interests. A discipline will attract in due course a certain number of concepts and ideas, such as Nah Dove’s maaticity, Jabali Ade’s eurobliviousness, Tillotson’s agency reduction formation, Mazama’s cognitive hiatus, Asante’s location theory, Maulana Karenga’s Kawaida, and Christel Temple’s Black cultural mythology. What these Africologists have done is to add to the literature of the discipline by giving us definitive concepts that we can use to do further research. Without conceptual tools, any discipline will die. The students and scholars will not have a branch on the tree of knowledge on which to hang their own thoughts. Departments are not disciplines; however, most departments are organized around single disciplines. Faculty in departments have similar perspectives, methods of inquiry, and assumptions about data, and they follow the same procedures for peer review. After nearly 60 years, we know the advantages of departments over interdisciplinary programs. Departments can hire faculty in the discipline. Most doctoral programs are organized by departments in our discipline. Once a person gains a doctorate in Africology, she should know how to assess work in the discipline. For us to be a strong discipline, we will need to work in unison on defining the nature of what we do. I have met doctoral students who have not been introduced to the origin of the field but are quite knowledgeable in the origins of political science, literary criticism, and sociology. I think there is a place for that, but it cannot be at the center of our discipline. Let me speak to the status of the doctoral programs in our discipline as observed through self-reported data and secondary sources. There remain 17 declared doctoral degrees in Black studies, at the following institutions: 1. Temple University (10 full-time faculty) 2. University of Massachusetts at Amherst (10 full-time faculty) 3. University of California at Berkeley (13 full-time faculty) 4. Indiana University (16 full-time faculty) 5. Harvard University (6 full-time faculty) 6. Yale University (2 full-time faculty) 7. Cornell University (12 full-time faculty) 8. Brown University (11 full-time faculty) 9. Northwestern University (12 full-time faculty) 10. University of Louisville (10 full-time faculty) 11. University of Texas (20 full-time faculty) 12. Ohio State University (10 full-time faculty) 13. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (8 full-time faculty)

14. Michigan State University (5 faculty; not accepting students) 15. Clark-Atlanta University (7 full-time faculty) The figure for each doctoral department is taken from its website. By counting the faculty who are attached one hundred percent to Africana studies, I was able to cut through some of the exaggeration that occurs when programs attach affiliated or associated professors to their departmental numbers. In some cases, nearly every faculty member was attached to some other department, as found at Harvard, Yale, and Texas. It is my opinion that the designers of these programs felt that a doctoral student should not receive a Ph.D. without being assigned to a “traditional” department as an assurance that the student would be properly guided. This is unfortunate, as it undermines the purpose for which Black studies was created by the courageous geniuses of the Sixties. In some ways, only Indiana University, University of Louisville, and Temple University seem to express, in their publications and creative productions, Pan African discourses, confrontation with minimalization of Blackness, Afrocentric perspectives on data and historical narratives, African cultural mythology, and development of discipline-specific concepts and models. These sentiments are derived from reading the research publications and curricular documents of members of various departments. Only three departments (Temple, Louisville, Clark Atlanta) had two or more professors with degrees in Africology. Although at least 16 departments offer the doctoral degree, only three of them have shown a commitment to hiring our doctoral students. I see in this unfortunate fact a great danger for a discipline that was born with the idea of challenging the “establishment” to provide a Pan African, Afrocentric foundation for exploring all phenomena related to African people. Each of these departments has its uniqueness; however, it is essential that we lean toward each other in championing the fundamental core principles of our discipline. This will allow us to hire Ph.D.s who have been trained in our discipline. Otherwise, we will only have a collection of professors teaching their own “traditional” disciplines and applying those tenets to African ideas, people, and events. With will, we can do this; I am prepared to say that we should be the last generation of scholars in this discipline without a Ph.D. in the field. Let us strive to hire people with doctorates from the universities offering the degree. Our Ph.D. programs must lead the discipline, not duplicate the models of Eurocentric studies. Unfortunately, in many cases, it is our undergraduate and master’s programs such as the California State Universities at Long Beach, San Diego, and Northridge, as well as Stockton State in New Jersey, Georgia State, and SUNY- Albany, that have created the majors that have gone on to become specialists in our discipline. Before I conclude, I would like to make one additional point with reference to a concern first expressed by Cecil Brown, who taught at Berkeley, in his book, Dude, Where’s My Black Studies Department? The Disappearance of Black Americans from our Universities. While I do not agree with all of Brown’s conclusions, I can agree that his observations deserve some attention. Black studies was created by African American students who opened the university up to all African knowledge from ancient Kemet to contemporary politics. I think that we must insist in our programs that students, and faculty, be introduced to the origins of Black studies, the warrants for the Afrocentric study of phenomena, and even the ideas of the Black speculative future, as in the work of Reynaldo Anderson. Accept this selective appraisal as one person’s account of what he sees as conceptual, structural, and creative problems in our beloved discipline. There is nothing sacred about what I