By Toyin Falola
I am full of gratitude to the Africana Studies Department, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, for giving me a third opportunity to keynote a conference on their beautiful campus. Rejoining the great poet, Professor Tanure Ojaide, was pleasurable. My old friends remain, notably Professor Honore Missihoun. New friends were added. I got to know the new Chair, the highly regarded philosopher, Professor Eddy Souffrant. Excellent papers were delivered over a period of two days. I spoke to a difficult issue—the ongoing crises in Black Studies. In this short piece, I summarize a complex set of arguments as part of the core of my presentation.
There is a paradox in Africana Studies today, even more glaring as Africana Studies expands and, in another sense, becomes constricted. Today, Africana Studies is expanding more than ever and is more vulnerable than ever. Africana Studies is more visible than ever, and more eroded in its very essence than ever. But not by coincidence; this is a continuation of an old struggle in a new guise: “neutrality,” “efficiency,” “marketability,” and “wokeness.” However, to understand the current siege of Africana Studies, we must situate it in a broader intellectual context. Knowledge, in every era of human history, has been a site of power. From the colonial archive to the neoliberal university, what is knowable and who is able to know have always been carefully curated. So, in a real sense, what is being played out in the current siege of Africana Studies is not only a disciplinary debate but a civilizational debate about the ownership of truth.
Essentially, however, what we know today as Africana Studies came into being not as an academic nicety, but as an epistemological necessity. It came into being in protest, nurtured in resistance, and established in struggle. The student movements of the 1960s did not ask for, nor were they offered, an elective in Africana Studies because of academic interest. Rather, they were asking for it because of a historical absence. And so, in this sense, then, we can speak of the insurgent nature of the discipline itself.
Still, the obstacles facing Africana Studies are different in terms of sophistication. The attack is no longer an ideological attack, but a structural one. The contemporary university, beholden to the dictates of neoliberalism, seeks to determine the worth of knowledge on the basis of profitability. Disciplines are no longer measured based on the degree to which they illuminate the human condition; rather, they are measured on the basis of the degree to which they contribute to the bottom line, attract funding, and the extent to which they prepare students for the market. In such an environment, Africana Studies is an inconvenience not because it is useless; rather, because its worth is not easily commodified.
The implications of this transformation into a marketplace are far-reaching. The student is repositioned as a customer, knowledge is constructed as a product, and education is constructed as a form of exchange. In such a marketplace of ideas, disciplines that promote critical consciousness, historical understanding, and ethical engagement are considered unproductive. Africana Studies, which challenges power, challenges comfort, and simplistic narratives, is an inconvenience to a system that rewards obedience over engagement.
But to talk about Africana Studies as a victim of institutional restructuring is to miss the point of its enduring relevance. It is not merely an intellectual discipline; it is a body of public knowledge. It is an inestimable gift because it teaches people to read the world in a certain way, to read a society in a certain way, to read the world critically, to see the possibility of injustice in a world where justice is possible, and to see the possibility of a world where justice is not merely possible but actual.
Democracy is not merely a system of procedures, as is so often assumed. Democracy is a system of government where a historical sense, a moral sense, and a cognitive curiosity inform the citizenry. Africana Studies is part of that project because it is a way of teaching students the intricacies of the issue of race. It is a way of teaching people not merely what happened but why it happened, but more importantly, how what happened continues to happen. It is a way of teaching people to act in the world in a significant way.
No less significant, however, is its contribution to what can arguably be termed memory work. As a discipline, history, as we are aware, is not simply a factual recount of events in the past. Rather, it is a constructed version of history, a version which, in many instances, is constructed by those with the power to record and document events. For many centuries, there was a deliberate omission or distortion of events relating to Africa and people of African descent in official records. Africana Studies, in this sense, breaks this silence by seeking to affirm other forms of knowledge. Accepting oral history as valid academia is an intervention.
Oral tradition in many African cultures isn’t written on paper. It lives through people’s memories, their voices, their stories, their customs. By validating these mediums of knowledge, Africana Studies widens the idea of what knowledge is. It’s doing more than preservation. They’re building a counter-narrative. They’re showing us where these narratives end. Giving voice to the margins doesn’t fracture knowledge. It completes it.
The value of Africana Studies, however, does not stop at the classroom or the archive. It is inextricably linked to the world of policy-making. The discipline has made significant contributions to some of the most salient issues of our time. Among these issues are mass incarceration, health disparities, educational inequities, and economic marginalization. The contributions of the discipline to these issues are not hypothetical; they have actually made it into various legislations. For example, in the context of mass incarceration, Africana Studies offer insight into the structural aspects of seemingly discrete issues.
Furthermore, in the context of public health, the discipline offers insight into the ways in which historical inequalities impact contemporary health disparities. In each of these cases, Africana Studies is shown to have a clear connection to the development of actionable knowledge. Perhaps most compellingly, however, is the way in which the discipline engages with the very pressing concern of survival on a planetary scale. The environmental crisis, understood in terms of science or technology, is in fact inextricably linked to issues of exploitation and inequality. Africana Studies can offer insight into this through the concept of racial capitalism.
This perspective reveals that ecological degradation is not incidental but systemic. The same structures that facilitated slavery and colonialism continue to shape patterns of environmental harm. Communities that contributed least to climate change often bear its greatest burdens. In this context, Africana Studies provides not only a critique but also alternative visions. At the center of these visions is the concept of “ancestral innovation,” or the idea of retrieving and utilizing indigenous knowledge systems. There is a long tradition of sustainable practices and methods in African approaches to nature, agriculture, and the use of natural resources. These methods, based on the harmony between nature and society, are an inspiration in an ecologically crisis-stricken world. If we take, as an example, the methods and ways of African approaches to nature and agriculture, which are “water-friendly” and “soil-friendly.” Or architectural forms that control temperatures without the need for artificial energy. Such practices are not relics of the past but are visions for the future. They subvert the dominant assumption that development must be synonymous with technological sophistication and instead offer a vision of development based on simplicity and flexibility.
At work here is a more general philosophical approach, one in which care, rather than accumulation, community rather than individualism, and continuity rather than consumption are the watchwords. And it is an approach that starkly contrasts with the logic of extraction that underlies modern economies. The future of Africana Studies, in other words, cannot simply be one of defence. While it is obviously the case that the forces which would diminish it must be opposed, it is equally the case that it must assert itself in ways that make clear its relevance. It must see itself, in other words, not simply as a peripheral but rather as a central component of global knowledge. It must be an exercise in what can be called ancestral innovation, a concept in which the traditional is not merely preserved but thought anew in the interests of the contemporary. We all must take seriously the field of Ancestral Studies that I created two years ago.
But perhaps equally important is the role that the next generation plays. The next generation of young scholars, young activists, and young digital artists must redefine the boundaries and possibilities of knowledge production. They are not waiting for permission or validation; they are remaking new platforms and new potentials. Thus, in this sense, the future of the discipline is uncertain and full of promise. The uncertainty is based on the challenges facing the discipline in a structural sense, while the promise is based on the structural strengths, which are part of the discipline as well.
Africana Studies has never been a discipline of comfort; rather, it has always been a discipline of struggle. Thus, to support Africana Studies is not simply to support a cause or a movement of the intellect but rather to support the idea of a pluralistic world in which there are different ways of knowing and where those ways of knowing confront and complement one another. The question, finally, is not whether or not Africana Studies will survive, but what kind of world we will create. A world without Africana Studies will be a world in which there are fewer departments, but it will be a world in which there will be less and less imagination, less and less democracy, and less and less understanding of identities.
