Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and Paradigms of Knowledge is both a reader and an introspective tribute, comprised of writings by James Turner and commentary from several of his former students. The book strives to underscore critical connections between multiple dimensions of Turner’s legacy (as scholar, activist, institution-builder, teacher, and mentor), while also aiming to contribute to the growing historicized literature on the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The contributors to this book hope to influence this early phase in Black/Africana Studies historiography and provide a resource for discourse on the future of the discipline.

Known variously as African studies, black studies, African American studies, Afro-American studies, and Africology, the academic study of the African diaspora as a holistic discipline is a relatively new phenomenon. University programs have been created with reference to a disciplinary matrix, retarding the development of appropriate theory and methods throughout Africana studies. Fifteen leaders in the field of Africana studies provide the conceptual framework for establishing the field as a mature discipline. The focus is on four basic areas: administration and organizational structure; disciplinary matrix; Africana womanism; and cultural aesthetics. The work examines both the theory and the method of scholars in African and African-diaspora studies.

Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory. With chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Negritude (Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor), Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Africana Critical Theory endeavors to accessibly offer contemporary critical theorists an intellectual archaeology of the Africana tradition of critical theory and a much-needed dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of black radical politics. These six seminal figures' collective thought and texts clearly cuts across several disciplines and, therefore, closes the chasm between Africana Studies and critical theory, constantly demanding that intellectuals not simply think deep thoughts, develop new theories, and theoretically support radical politics, but be and constantly become political activists, social organizers and cultural workers - that is, folk the Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci referred to as 'organic intellectuals.' In this sense, then, the series of studies gathered in Africana Critical Theory contribute not only to African Studies, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, but also to contemporary critical theoretical discourse across an amazingly wide-range of 'traditional' disciplines, and radical political activism outside of (and, in many instances, absolutely against) Europe's ivory towers and the absurdities of the American academy.

Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom, showing that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom became thwarted.

The systematic study of the Africana/Black experience emerged in universities in the USA in the late 1960s. As an outgrowth of the Civil Rights and Black Conscious movements, demonstrations occurred on campuses nationwide, giving birth to the new academic discipline. Written by emerging and established scholars and published in the Western Journal of Black Studies over a span of three decades beginning in 1977, the 27 essays included in Africana Studies provide an evolutionary trajectory of the discipline, including theoretical, ideological, and methodological perspectives and paradigms. The primary focus is the African American experience with emphasis on how theoretical and methodological approaches have changed over time as the discipline matured. Topics include pre-colonial literacy and scholarship in West Africa, Black Nationalism, intellectual foundations of racism, and the ideology of European dominance. Articles also address African American personality development, gender relationships, self-identity, masculinity, crime, blueprints for economic development, and digitalization of the discipline. This fundamental collection challenges assumptions, misconceptions, and negative stereotypes within the behavioral sciences, social sciences, and liberal arts fields, and portrays the strength, resilience, and diversity of African and African American peoples.

This book introduces readers to the rich discipline of Africana Studies, reflecting on how it has developed over the last fifty years as an intellectual enterprise for knowledge production about Africa and the African diaspora. The African world has always had a wealth of indigenous knowledge systems, but for the greater part of the scholarly history, hegemonic Western epistemologies have denied the authenticity of African indigenous ways of knowing. The post-colonial era has seen steady and deliberate efforts to expand the frontiers of knowledge about black people and their societies, and to Africanize such bodies of knowledge in all fields of human endeavor. This book reflects on how the multidisciplinary discipline of Africana Studies has transformed and reinvented itself as it has sought to advance knowledge about the African world. The contributors consider the foundations of the discipline, its key theories and methods of knowledge production, and how it interacts with popular culture, Women’s Studies, and other area studies such as Ethnic and Afro-Latinix Studies. Bringing together rich insights from across history, religion, literature, art, sociology, and philosophy, this book will be an important read for students and researchers of Africa and Africana Studies.

This survey of methodology provides a framework for understanding Africana Studies. Correlating this book to research and writing in Africana Studies, helps to extend the perplexity, paradox, and parley of social science and humanistic research. This book attempts to answer, what is Africana Studies with reference to an interdisciplinary body of knowledge? Africana Studies is the global Pan-Africanist study of African phenomena interpreted from an Afrocentric perspective. Among those scholars who contribute to this interdisciplinary body of knowledge, perspective signals the commonality in the school of thought. This book offers general definitions and descriptions of the qualitative and quantitative research.

Ever since the first contacts between Europe and Africa, African people have been confined to the fringes of Eurocentric experience in the Western mind. Much of what we have studied in African history and culture, or literature and linguistics, or politics and economics, has been orchestrated from the standpoint of Europe's interests. Whether it is a matter of economics, history, politics, geographical concepts, or art, Africans have been seen as peripheral. This volume reviews the past in order to evaluate the present and move ahead with appropriate policies for the future. The authors focus on issues of affirmative action, legal culture, theories of black culture, and methodologies of scholarly work in Africana studies.Contents include: Cecil Blake, ""The Culture Nexus Construct in Africana Studies,"" Ronald Turner, ""On Palatable, Palliative, and Paralytic Affirmative Action, Grutter-Style,"" Winston A. Van Horne, ""Three Concepts of Legitimacy,"" Robert E. Weems, Jr., ""Africana Studies and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment: What Can be Done,"" Ula Y. Taylor, ""Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam: Separatism, Regendering, and a Secular Approach to Black Power after Malcolm X,"" Lewis R. Gordon, ""Must Revolutionaries Sing the Blues? Thinking through Fanon and the Leitmotif of the Black Arts Movement,"" Delores P. Aldridge, ""Race, Gender, and Africana Theorizing,"" and James L. Conyers, ""Biography and Africology: Method and Interpretation."" The volume concludes with reviews of significant recent scholarship on black history and culture.Law, Culture, and Africana Studies will have particular interest for scholars in the fields of American and European studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and specialists in African-American studies.

In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies’ subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.