Reaffirmation and Renewal of the Discipline

Maulana Karenga, California State University, Long Beach 

Introduction

The urgent and ongoing issue and project of sustaining Afri­ca­na/Black Studies in the twenty-first century points inevitably to the task of con­stant reaffirmation and renewal in and of the dis­ci­pline.^[1] Thus, there is no need for a rush to respond in face of the perennial pre­dictions and pre­cip­i­tous pronouncements of our disciplinary disability and death. For these appear as little more than coun­ter­claims to our early call for “the death of white social science”^[2] and our later call for the necessary, though admittedly, “painful demise of Eurocentricism”.^[3] Rather, it is a constant question of ongoing development and enhancement of our ca­pa­ci­ty to recover, discover, and reconstruct the rich, ancient, and modern resources of our culture, and put them in the service of the con­tin­u­ous human quest to understand the world and our­selves in it, and to change each in the interest of human free­dom, global justice, and good in the world.

What I want to do, then, is to discuss sustainment as a function of continuing reaffirmation and renewal, rooted in the core mis­sion of Black Studies and its demonstrated adaptive vitality in the context of ever-changing conditions within the discipline and the world. And I want to pursue this conversation within the philo­soph­i­cal framework of the ancient Egyptian concept of serudj, a poly­­semic term from the social and moral vocabulary of Maatian thought which offers both an ethical ideal and an obligation.^[4] Rising out of the ancient African in­tel­lec­tu­al-ac­ti­vist tradition in which libraries and schools are called “houses of life,” serudj links knowledge and social engagement and vari­ous­ly means an ongoing obligation and effort to transform and re­store in an enhanced and more effective form.

It thus speaks to the general and specific task of sustaining and developing the discipline, constantly enhancing its capacity to fulfill its core mission. Moreover, in its most expansive sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, serudj is joined with the word ta and serudj ta means to repair and transform the world, making it more beautiful and ben­e­ficial than when we inherited it. And this speaks to the world-en­com­pas­­sing character of the Black Studies project, i.e., the glo­bal range and interests of its subject matter and those of its acti­vist-scholars.

Black Studies came into being relentlessly questioning society and the university as its academic servant, and it can only proceed and continuously develop by constantly questioning itself in an equal­ly rigorous and relevant way^[5] Moreover, this ongoing questioning must not be merely a convenient confessional to accommodate the academy’s current intellectual attachments to deconstructive discourse. Rather, it must be a genuine self-reflection, which is deeply rooted in our own intellectual tradition of critique and corrective, appreciates the historical achievements and current concerns of the disci­pline, and seeks to build on this foundation, frameworks, and mo­dal­i­ties for continuing initiatives and expansions in the field.^[6]

Discipline Leadership

It is in this context of self-reflection, reaffirmation, and re­new­al that chairs and directors of a department or program play a piv­ot­al leadership role. Indeed, the hinge on which the role of chairs or di­rectors turns is their active commitment to a program of the high­est quality and the culturally grounded pedagogy, on­going in­tel­lectual productivity, and social engagement such a pro­gram de­mands. To move beyond routine bureaucratic competence and the role of an accommodating administration functionary, chairs must un­der­stand and assert themselves as self-conscious and committed mem­bers and leaders of a particular community of schol­ars ded­i­cat­ed to sustaining and developing the discipline. This they do through the rigor and relevance of their scholarship and pedago­gy, the quality and extent of their social engagement, and the in­sight­fulness and in­novativeness of their leadership.

In such a context and paradigm of intellectual community, chairs, directors, and senior faculty play a decisive role in discipline leadership, not only by rooting their work in the consensual and collaborative mission of the discipline, but also by encouraging and aiding the faculty in various ways to do likewise. They must also build linkages within the field to share best practices and ini­tiatives and keep current in the discipline, using the most ad­vanced in­for­ma­tion systems. Likewise, they should give priority to hiring within the discipline to ensure critical mass, constant and col­laborative dis­ci­pline-specific intellectual production, and conti­nu­ity for its schol­ar­ly community. And finally, they must build mu­tually beneficial re­la­tions with administrators, scholars, and profes­sional organizations of other disciplines, as well as our own.

The Discipline Mission

Every discipline emerges within a collaboratively established and shared mission that undergirds and informs its self-un­der­standing and self-assertion in the academy and society, and Black Studies evolved in a similar matter. Although there was obviously a diversity of interests and emphases in the early directions and dis­course of the emerging discipline, Black Studies scholars and ac­ti­vists began to form what Stewart^[7] calls a “coherent in­tel­­lec­tual enterprise” as expressed in an overarching triple mis­sion, in­formed and shaped by the Black Liberation Struggle of the 1960s and 70s with its stress on freedom, self-determination, jus­tice, power, cultural cen­tered­ness and linking knowledge with so­cial engagement. Thus, the mission of Black Studies stressed three basic areas of focus: cul­tural ground­ing, academic excellence, and social responsibility”.^[8]

Cultural Grounding. Cultural grounding is at the heart of the Black Studies project and reflects the essential assumption that Af­ri­can culture, the initiative and experience of African people in the world, is worthy of the most careful, critical, and in-depth study and the source of some of humanity’s most important paradigms.^[9] As African peoples’ unique way of being human in the world, African culture, in its var­ied ex­pres­sions, then, is the indispensable terrain and text for Black Stud­ies’ critical exploration, paradigm construction and teach­ing.^[10]

The issue of cultural grounding also speaks to the need to con­stant­ly dialogue with African culture. That is to say, to continuously ask it questions and seek from it answers to the fundamental ques­tions of human life. These include enduring issues as well as fund­a­mental challenges of our times, i.e., how to create a just and good society and a good and sustainable world; build and sustain strong male/female relations and families; establish a right rela­tion­ship with the environment; design and use technology for the highest hu­man good; and create and sustain an ever-expand­ing realm of hu­­man freedom and human flourishing?

Also, the intellectual integrity of the discipline requires that the core data and the methodology we use to produce and teach Africana Studies are actually rooted in and rise out of the culture of African peoples—continental and diasporan, ancient and mod­ern, regardless of supplementary and secondary sources of our knowl­edge and practice. Thus, as Asante has argued, Af­ri­cana Studies “is not merely an aggregation of courses on Af­ri­can American history and literature.” Rather, it is “the Af­ro­cen­tric study of African phenomena.”^[11] In a word, the discipline must be in­formed by “an orientation to data,” a methodology that is root­ed in the cultural image and human interests of African people and engages them as subjects and agents of their own lives, his­tory and culture.^[12]

Academic Excellence. The emphasis on academic excellence is stres­sed to reaffirm our commitment to the highest level of intel­lec­tual production and teaching as Black Studies scholars, and to providing the process and practice in which students achieve a similar intellectual grounding in the discipline. In addition, aca­dem­ic excellence speaks to the issues of the intellectual co­her­ence and integrity of the discipline and defense against disciplin­ary dilution and fluid and over-extended boundaries. Here, it is im­por­tant to note that Black Studies is a multi-field discipline that requires one of the widest ranges of competence in the acad­emy. As a pan-Africanist project from its inception, it seeks to encompass and critically engage, from an African-centered posi­tion, the an­cient, modern, and diverse peoples and cultures of the world Afri­can community.^[13] But Africana Stud­ies, as a disci­pline, resists the attempt at radical separation of it from the source and impetus of its origin and development, i.e., the African Ameri­can community and its historic and ongoing liberation struggle to expand the realm of freedom in the academy, society and world. Maintaining this emphasis or, as James Turner^[14] calls it, “primary concentration on African America,” while ex­pand­ing out­ward­ly to critically engage the world African communi­ty, was essential to the origin and evolution of Black Studies and is like­wise vital to its sustainment.

Finally, academic excellence requires an increase in discipline-specific literature, constant expansion in essential areas, especially Black women’s and womanist studies, classical African studies, eth­ics (social, environmental, medical, etc.), information techn­ol­o­gy, comparative multicultural and ethnic studies, and global issues stud­ies.^[15] There is also an urgent need to hire per­sons with terminal degrees in the discipline. Indeed, an expanded body of discipline-specific literature, the development of a critical mass of scholars who are graduates of Africana Studies and not at­tached to other disciplines, the continued strengthening of pro­fes­sional organizations of the discipline (NCBS, AHSA), and thus the intellectual integrity of the discipline, all depend on hiring prac­ti­ces that ensure the constant growth, continuity, and con­tin­u­ance of the Africana Studies scholarly community.

Social Engagement. The third central element in the mission and expansive meaning of Black Studies is social engagement, de­signed to reaffirm the discipline’s commitment to using knowl­edge to im­prove the human condition and enhance the human pros­pect. From its inception, Black Studies understood itself, not only as a source of socially relevant intellectual production and ex­change, but also an agency of progressive and radical social change. It link­ed intellectual emancipation with political emancipation and com­mit­ted itself to both in a single interrelated project. This is logically linked to Black Studies’ commitment to critique and cor­rec­tive, which assigns a social activist and emancipatory role to both ed­u­ca­tion and the educated.^[16] Thus emerges the fundamental concept and activity of the schol­ar-activist.

As noted above, the Kemetic concept of serudj ta, repairing and transforming the world, points toward the self-understanding of Africana Studies as a world-encompassing project whose central ground of concern and engagement is the world African com­mu­ni­ty. However, as Africana Studies scholar-activists, our focus on the world African community compels us to deal with the world as a whole, as it impacts us and we impact it in our ongoing efforts to know the past and honor it, engage the present and improve it, and imagine the future and forge it.

References

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_______________. 2002. Introduction to Black Studies, 3rd edition. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.

_______________. 2006b. Maat, The moral ideal in ancient Egypt: A study in classical African ethics. Los Angeles: University of San­ko­re Press; first printed by Routledge, 2004.

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____________. 1992. Reaching for higher ground: Toward an un­der­­standing of Black/Africana Studies. The Afrocentric Scholar 1(1), 1–63  (May).

____________. 2006. Social science and systematic inquiry in Afri­cana studies: Challenges for the 21st century. In Handbook of Black Studies, eds Molefi Asante and Maulana Karenga, 379–401. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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Endnotes

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