AFA 5005/4930

Afro-American Studies
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MODULE TWO
REVIEW
SESSION
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Exam Question

 Imagine that you are hosting a dinner party and sitting around the table are
W.E.B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Melville Herskowitz, Sid Mintz, Sally and
Richard Price, N. Fadeke Castor, Christina Sharpe, Manning Marable, and a
number of scholars who hold different viewpoints on: 1) the origins of African
American culture, 2) the definition of Blackness, 3) the relationship between
activism and scholarship, and 4) the best way to challenge racism and racist
ideologies. They spend the evening in passionate debate about the past,
present, and future of African-Americans and African-American Studies.
Drawing upon the materials assigned in ‘Module Two: African-American
Studies’, write a transcript of the evening’s conversation(s). Be sure to capture
what these researchers, social theorists, and activists contribute to the
theorization of Afro-America and to place their ideas in conversation with one
another.
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Origins of Afro-American Culture

 Key Ideas, Questions and Debates

 What occurs when the bearers of different cultures come together?
 What is the relationship to Africa? What factors influence the point
at which people cease to be African…or do they?
 Can origins be identified?
 Africanisms v. Creolization
 Challenge to the assumption that European cultures were more
effectively transmitted than African ones
 Cultural relativism….understanding each culture on its own terms
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Origins of Afro-American Culture

 Afro-centricity: emphasis on Africa and African origins, African

culture is the foundation for Afro-America

 Critique of Afro-centricity: exclusions, ahistorical…

 Challenge to Western epistemology

 What are the stakes of the different perspectives?

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Origins of Afro-American Culture

 Scholars and Their Ideas

 Herskovits: Africanisms
 Price and Price
 Mintz
 Castor
 Others…?
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Theorizing Blackness

 Scholars and Their Ideas

 DuBois
 Castor
 Sharpe
 Others…?
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Theorizing Blackness

 Key Ideas, Questions and Debates

 Blackness as heterogenous
 Blackness through time—the past living in the present ie: the “afterlife of slavery”
 What constitutes the black collective?
 What and who lay outside the boundaries of blackness?
 Intersectionality, race as social construct, connection between racism and
capitalism (Morris and Ghaziani)
 Is blackness defined through/as oppression and the struggle against it?
 Race as social construction that organizes groups hierarchically in order to
attain and sustain white dominance, creates “worlds” that are discrete and
antagonistic (Olson)
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Activism and Scholarship

 Key Ideas, Questions and Debates

 Is Afro-centrism, as activist scholarship, a legitimate intellectual
perspective?
 Is there such a thing as objective scholarship?
 Herskovits v. DuBois
 Connections between Sharpe’s work and Black Lives Matter
movement
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Activism and Scholarship

 Scholars and Their Ideas

 Marable
 DuBois
 Herskovits
 Karenga
 Asante
 Sharpe
 Others…?
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Anti-Racist Strategies

 Key Ideas, Questions and Debates

 Is education the route to end racial oppression?
 If we take a systematic approach to understanding the production
and reproduction of social inequality, can we then dismantle it?
(Marable)
 What is the role of Pan-Africanism in anti-racist struggle?
 Race concept as emancipatory: “self-definition and common
consciousness”…need the race concept in order to combat racism
(Irele)
 What is the role of social science in social change? (Olson)
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Anti-Racist Strategies

 Scholars and Their Ideas

 DuBois
 Frazier
 Marable
 Irele
 Sharpe
 Others…?