The Equity Report #6: The Liberation of Black Studies: A Quest for Identity in Africana Studies

Black Studies was born from rupture. Africana Studies emerged from reflection.

If Black Studies in the late 1960s demanded institutional recognition of Black knowledge within the United States, Africana Studies developed in the decades that followed as a broader intellectual recalibration, one that asked whether the nation-state itself was too narrow a container for understanding Black life. The establishment of Black Studies departments across the country marked a historic victory for student activists and scholar-organizers who forced universities to acknowledge Black intellectual traditions as legitimate areas of inquiry (Biondi, 2012; Rojas, 2007). Yet institutional recognition did not resolve deeper conceptual questions. Was Black identity primarily national or diasporic? Was the field intended to document African American history, or to theorize the global condition of African-descended peoples shaped by colonialism, slavery, migration, and racial capitalism?

By the 1970s and 1980s, scholars increasingly recognized that limiting inquiry to the United States risked reproducing the provincialism Black Studies originally challenged. The forced dispersal of Africans across the Atlantic world through the transatlantic slave trade produced interconnected communities throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and the African continent itself. These communities were linked not only by ancestry but by shared encounters with colonial domination, labor exploitation, cultural suppression, and racial stratification (Drake, 1987; Gilroy, 1993). To examine Black life solely within U.S. borders was to fragment a global historical formation shaped by empire.

The transition from Black Studies to Africana Studies was therefore epistemological rather than cosmetic. Africana Studies sought to theorize Black identity through diaspora as method. Diaspora was not simply geographic dispersion. It was a framework for understanding how memory, culture, resistance, and political consciousness traveled across oceans and generations. Earlier Pan-African thinkers had already laid this groundwork. W.E.B. Du Bois consistently framed the color line as global in scope, connecting African American struggles to anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean (Du Bois, 1903; Du Bois, 1947). Marcus Garvey mobilized millions under the banner of transnational Black unity, emphasizing economic self-determination and African redemption (Hill, 1983). These traditions challenged the containment of Black identity within U.S. political discourse.

Scholars such as St. Clair Drake advanced the concept of the African diaspora as a sociological and historical formation, arguing that African-descended peoples shared structural experiences rooted in slavery and colonialism while developing diverse cultural expressions (Drake, 1987). John Henrik Clarke insisted that reconnecting African American history to African civilizations was essential for intellectual sovereignty and cultural continuity (Clarke, 1991). Their work reframed Black identity as historically layered and globally entangled.

The formal adoption of the term Africana Studies by many institutions in the 1980s and 1990s signaled this expanded scope. The term acknowledged continental Africa, the Caribbean, Afro-Latin America, and Black Europe as integral to the field’s inquiry. It recognized that anti-Blackness operated transnationally through colonial extraction, global labor markets, migration regimes, and cultural imperialism. Africana Studies thus examined how slavery in Brazil, colonial governance in the Caribbean, apartheid in South Africa, and racialization in Britain formed part of a shared global structure of anti-Blackness (Robinson, 1983; Gilroy, 1993).

At the level of theory, Africana Studies expanded methodological debates within the field. Maulana Karenga advanced Kawaida philosophy, centering African cultural values and collective ethics as foundational to intellectual production (Karenga, 1980). Molefi Kete Asante articulated Afrocentricity as a methodological corrective that repositioned African agency at the center of analysis rather than as a derivative of European modernity (Asante, 1987). While Afrocentric approaches generated debate, they reflected a broader effort to decolonize knowledge production and resist Eurocentric universality.

Simultaneously, Black feminist and diasporic scholars reshaped Africana Studies by challenging both patriarchal nationalism and narrow cultural essentialism. Angela Davis situated racial capitalism within global prison regimes and labor exploitation, linking domestic racial inequality to international economic restructuring (Davis, 1981; Davis, 2003). Sylvia Wynter argued that Western modernity constructed a racialized category of the human that excluded Black existence from full recognition, thereby requiring a redefinition of the human itself (Wynter, 2003). Paul Gilroy conceptualized the Black Atlantic as a space of cultural hybridity, intellectual exchange, and counter-modernity, challenging nationalist frameworks that confined identity within territorial borders (Gilroy, 1993).

Black feminist thinkers also insisted that diaspora must account for gender, sexuality, and class. The Combahee River Collective’s articulation of interlocking oppressions prefigured later intersectional analysis and reinforced that global Black identity could not be theorized without attending to gendered and heteronormative hierarchies (Combahee River Collective, 1977). This intervention prevented Africana Studies from reproducing masculinist narratives that equated diaspora solely with male leadership and nationalist struggle.

The liberation of Black Studies into Africana Studies was also strategic within institutional contexts. As universities increasingly absorbed Black Studies into multicultural diversity frameworks, there was a risk of depoliticization. Africana Studies reasserted analytical depth by foregrounding colonialism, racial capitalism, and transnational power structures (Robinson, 1983; Rojas, 2007). It insisted that representation without structural analysis was insufficient. By expanding its geographic and theoretical reach, the field resisted containment within domestic race relations discourse.

Debates within the field continue. Some scholars caution that broadening to Africana may obscure the specificity of African American historical experience. Others argue that retaining a solely national focus reproduces intellectual isolation and limits comparative analysis. These tensions reflect a dynamic discipline negotiating its scale and accountability rather than a fragmentation of purpose.

Today, Africana Studies functions as archive and horizon. It preserves the insurgent origins of Black Studies while expanding its frame to examine migration, climate displacement, global policing, health inequities, digital surveillance, and cultural production across the diaspora. It studies the Haitian Revolution alongside Reconstruction, Caribbean independence movements alongside U.S. civil rights struggles, and contemporary Afro-Latinx activism alongside African American political organizing.

If Black Studies declared that Black life mattered within the academy, Africana Studies asserts that Black life is foundational to understanding modernity itself. The field’s evolution reflects an ongoing quest for identity that refuses confinement to a single geography or historical moment. It recognizes that diaspora is not a metaphor but a lived condition shaped by displacement, survival, and creativity.

The evolution is not abandonment. It is expansion. It is liberation through scale.

References

Asante, M. K. (1987). The Afrocentric idea. Temple University Press.

Biondi, M. (2012). The Black revolution on campus. University of California Press.

Clarke, J. H. (1991). African people in world history. Black Classic Press.

Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective statement.

Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race, & class. Random House.

Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

Drake, S. C. (1987). Black folk here and there (Vol. 1). UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. A. C. McClurg.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1947). The world and Africa. Viking Press.

Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Hill, R. A. (Ed.). (1983). The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association papers (Vol. 1). University of California Press.

Karenga, M. (1980). Kawaida theory: An introductory outline. Kawaida Publications.

Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Zed Press.