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African American Studies

The fundamental rationale for the African American Studies program is that there now exists a substantial body of scholarly writing on African American social, cultural, economic and political life and history, conducted by scholars with a primary training in a traditional discipline, who have drawn on the work of colleagues in other fields to enrich their work. This interdisciplinary corpus of scholarship is at the core of African American studies, and most serious work on African American literature, history, culture and social, economic or political life, proceeds with an awareness of this interdisciplinary background. There is, as a result, a fairly substantial tradition of writings and a lexicon of ideas that together define a core of knowledge in the field. Familiarity with this core at the graduate level is an important part of the training of those who work on these topics.

Along with this background, there is also a good deal of work on the concept of race, which is clearly central to the field, and that can no longer be said to be rooted in a single primary discipline. It draws on anthropology, sociology and intellectual history, the history of science and philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and political science.

These two corpora are substantial enough and of sufficient importance that training in them provides a significant component of the graduate education of a student who wishes to work in African American studies at the same time as acquiring the intellectual tools of a primary discipline.

Our conception of the “American” in “African American” is capacious, not least because a full history of the African presence in the United States cannot be properly constructed without attention to relations among communities in many parts of the New World. There are many other reasons why this is intellectually necessary: a proper understanding of the concept of race, for example, must be comparative (and thus cross-national); and we are bound to acknowledge the complex role of economic, religious, and intellectual linkages among communities of African descent within the Americas, as well as their connections with Africa and with Europe. These general points can be illustrated by various iconic examples: Marcus Garvey, the founder of the largest African American mass political movement in the first half of this century was a Jamaican; Alexander Crummell, who was born in New York, was shaped by his experiences as one of the founders of the University of Liberia; the decolonization of Africa and the presence of African diplomats in New York at the United Nations affected the politics of the Civil Rights movement.

It is this interdisciplinary, comparative, cross-national approach to African American subjects in the humanities and the social sciences that makes our PhD program unique. Students study these topics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, participating in graduate seminars in anthropology, government, history, literature, and sociology, for example. Thus, they are able to ask and answer questions from a wider variety of perspectives than traditional disciplinary approaches allow. This interdisciplinary approach enables a student to produce richly contextualized analyses while retaining a principle focus within one discipline. The core seminar assures that students have familiarity with the essential social, political, economic and cultural background, and a body of established questions central to the field.