Talk:Africana studies

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can we turn this back into a disambiguation page please? It can never be more than a WP:CFORK of African studies and African American studies. If you are interested in the topic, please please invest some energy into the pathetic African studies stub instead. If 10% of the energy wasted in bickering on Talk:Afrocentrism went into constructive work on topics of African studies, Wikipedia coverage of the field would be several classes better than it is. thanks, dab (𒁳) 17:08, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with this being a disambig page or a very short article that links to African studies and African American studies, but there are a lot of Africana Studies departments at U.S. colleges and universities. I have no idea how many there are versus African Studies/African American Studies departments, but it's not an uncommon way of structuring a department in the U.S. I think this has more to do with departmental budgets than ideology, honestly--if you widen your focus to the Americas and Africa, you can justify hiring more faculty, get more majors, etc. --Akhilleus (talk) 17:28, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Do you have some sources to support that? It sounds true, I think we should describe this in the article. futurebird (talk) 17:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand why it would be a disambig page? And how is it a content fork?

African American Studies + Afro-Cuban Studies + Afro-____ Studies + ... + African Studies = Africana studies

or if you like

African Diaspora Studies + African Studies = Africana studies

This is a fairly new development in university organization, but it's pretty universal. I was going to make a list of universities with Africana departments, but there were too many. This is a field with its own history and development. I agree that African Studies needs work, but working on this isn't detracting from that... and they aren't the same things. I don't really see your point.

I don't know why you see the working being done at Afrocentricity as "wasted energy." I think in the past few days we've gone a long way to improving that important article and adding better sources and making sense of the topic for readers. I think it is unkind to suggest that our efforts are "wasted." Please don't do that. Nearly every talk page conversation has resulted in meaningful changes to the article. I think with some more work we could see if we could get it rated GA. That would be awesome. futurebird (talk) 17:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's hard to see that this article is going to have much content that isn't covered at African Studies, African American Studies, and so on. Unless someone has some reliable sources that can explain the impetus behind creating departments of Africana Studies vs. the other ways in which these subjects are organized. --Akhilleus (talk) 17:45, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I've found a lot of information with a quick google search, and it would not really fit in the other two articles. futurebird (talk) 18:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that looks valuable, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Africana Studies is just one way of organizing the study of Africa and the African diaspora. I mean, you don't want to tell Penn's African Studies Center that they're a subfield of Africana Studies; there, African Studies is a department and a major in its own right, not a subfield. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:24, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I am surprised to find that the term has as much currency as it does (considering it is a philological accident), so we might keep the article around for the "history of the term". The fact remains that "Africana studies = African diaspora studies + African studies". The identification of "Africa" and "African diaspora" is, of course, political, viz. the core postulate of Pan-Africanism. Consequently, "Africana studies" is a term of Pan-Africanism, while the actual content of the field is identical to the simple sum of the two subfields mentioned. dab (𒁳) 09:54, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] title / term

Perhaps we should move this to Black studies instead? "Africana studies" seems to be merely a 1990s neologism replacing earlier "Black studies". Add to this that "Africana studies" is a philological embarassment: Some innocent soul seems to have isolated the term from the name of the "Africana Studies and Research Center" (where "Studies and Research" modifies "Center"). It appears the neuter plural africana was conflated with the feminine singular africana in Du Bois' Encyclopedia Africana. dab (𒁳) 10:33, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

No. I don't think we should do that because the field is active and that's simply not what it's called anymore. It'd be like calling the article on African American Culture Afro-American Culture or Colored America Culture or something. The name changes holds significance for the content of the field it's not that they are the same. These things are not static, feilds change. I think it's enough that "black studies" is mentioned a few times. "Africana studies" is a philological embarassment" Isn't this just your opinion? futurebird (talk) 12:20, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab's quite right about the philological improbability of "Africana studies", but I doubt that very many people who use the term have a strong enough knowledge of Latin to be bothered.

By the way, there are a number of Black studies departments around: http://www.blackstudies.ucsb.edu/ http://www.swarthmore.edu/blackstudies.xml. I'd be pretty careful about saying that no one calls it that any more. --Akhilleus (talk) 16:27, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, studia Africana is reasonably plausible Latin. So I'll back off from the comment about philological implausibility. Not that I think anyone had Latin in mind when they were trying to figure out a new name for their department... --Akhilleus (talk) 07:07, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

um, yes, Studia Africana is the correct Latin for "African studies". "Africana studies" is macaronic at best (in which case it would be exactly synonymous to African studies), but I suspect it directly derives from the "Africana Studies and Research Center". The latter is a straightforward "studies and research center" dealing with "Africana", viz. "African miscellanea". That is, the Africana here is nominalized, while in Studia Africana it is a simple adjective agreeing with studia. From "Africana Studies and Research Center" (1969), it appears via chunking innocent of knowledge of Latin, isolated "Africana Studies" appears in the 1977 Cincinnati publication (but interestingly together with Studia Africana...). I frankly find it sad to observe that it is no big deal even for University departments these days to name things in Pig Latin. Not that this is only an US phenomenon (a much more pathetic example in this respect is the "האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים", a nominal phrase translating to "the Hebrew University is in Jerusalem". That's so sad it is actually hilarious...), but I would submit that it would have been more in the spirit of things if they had tried a name in Swahili, not broken Latin. dab (𒁳) 10:43, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pan-African

If anything people working in Africana studies are likely to spend their time looking at "pan-Africanism" as a cultural development, they're not really a a part of it. So, I think we should remove the banner. Do you have any sources that identify Africana studies as part of the Pan-African movement? futurebird (talk) 12:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure I understand this correctly. But isn't the conflation of African studies and African American studies into a "single" field an instance of Pan-Africanism by definition? Per the definition in the article, "Pan-Africanism" is "a world view, as well as a movement, which seeks to unify and uplift both native Africans and those of the African diaspora". I am not sure if "Africana studies" are trying to "uplift" anything (although the constant mention of "experience" seems to suggest that), but they are by definition "unifying native Africans and the African diaspora" by including both under the umbrella of "Africana". I am not saying this is good or bad, or valid or invalid, it is merely an observation: The idea of treating African-American topics and African topics as "really" the same field is clearly an idea arising from Afrocentrist approaches generated in the 1960s civil rights movement, and the term "Black" or "Africana" studies is a direct outgrowth of that. Again, I have no intention of disparaging the approach: if that's the "experience" people are looking for, there is nothing wrong with it, and in fact the Africana encyclopedia seems to be a valuable publication which among other things debunks the more hilarious pseudo-scholarship that is still rampant on our Afrocentrism and "Race and Ancient Egypt" articles: perhaps our resident Afrocentrists will be more prepared to swallow scholarship that comes out of "Africana" institutions than the scholarship of dead white men. dab (𒁳) 15:13, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Pan-Africanism is political movement. One might pursue Africana studies and not agree with all of the Pan-African philosophy, as far as I can tell, if we are going to make the link we need to source it. futurebird (talk) 13:07, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

This article is concerned with the fact that Black studies (or African American studies, Africana studies, Pan-African studies, African Centered studies, Afrocentric studies, Africalogical studies, African and African Diaspora studies—they all basically mean the same thing) continues to have a contested existence in the U.S. academy.

Okay, here is a source that says "they are the same thing" but it also says that the field is very diverse, so it seems reasonable that simply calling it "pan-African" might be controversial to some.

Admittedly, the field is very diverse with numerous schools of thought. Yet rather than viewing this diversity as a problem, it should endorse the fact that Black studies continues to make strides in the academy.

I still don't think the template belongs, but a statement about the relation to Pan-Africanism, might be in order. futurebird (talk) 14:10, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree. I don't insist on keeping the template at all. dab (𒁳) 16:38, 30 November 2007 (UTC)