Africatoday 63 2 06

African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements
Author(s): Jamie Monson

Source: Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Winter 2016), pp. 66-75
Published by: Indiana University Press
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African Studies: New Directions,
Global Engagements
Jamie Monson
The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies:

Back to the Future?
In 1997, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza wrote as president of the African Studies Asso-
ciation that the field of African studies had been plagued by perpetual crisis
since its institutionalization in the 1950s. The crisis had its roots in deeply
embedded historical structures of race and hierarchy, on the one hand, and
institutional power over the production of knowledge on the other. He wrote
that scholars in the field were working in unyielding solitudes and bitter
contestations that divided African American from European American and
from African scholars. Until these solitudes could be transcended, the field
would continue to founder. He went further in his challenge: he suggested
that the crisis of the 1990s could lead African studies back to the future,
as cold warera strategic concerns declined and a return could take place
to transcontinental scholarship that was both intellectually rigorous and
socially responsible.1
Sandra E. Greene, speaking as president of the African Studies Associa-
tion the following year, made a similar argument, stating that the crisis in
the field would continue so long as Africanist scholarship from the North
continued to play a gatekeeping role and remained detached from African
realities. Greene stated that the time had come for a strong bridge between
Africanist and African scholars, as a necessary precondition for the field
to flourish, stating that it was imperative that African studies address its
uncompleted agendas and unacknowledged concerns.2
William Martin and Michael West wrote hopefully, in an article titled
A Future with a Past, echoing Zeleza, that African studies during this time
of crisis was moving into a post-Africanist era. While powerful institutions
may have been seeing their demise in the postcold war world order, Martin
and West were optimistic about the possibilities for an African studies cen-
tered in Africa and untethered from military funding and developmentalist
paradigms. They anticipated that the field would diverge productively from
One Africa to Many Africas without a single hegemonic paradigm.3
Africa Today Vol. 63, No. 2 Copyright The Trustees of Indiana University DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.63.2.06
These and other significant interventions in the 1990s sought to open
a more global vision of African studies, one that left behind the narrow
nationalisms of cold-war area studies and embraced its roots in African dia-
sporic intellectual traditions, while bridging the conventional subdivision of
the continent into sub-Saharan and Northern Africa. The end of area stud-
ies could allow not only for a return to a broader intellectual geography in
African studies, but also the inclusion of multidisciplinary explorations that
africa TODAY 63(2)

would no longer be restricted by the need to serve national strategic agendas.
Nearly twenty years have passed since these debates about the crises
confronting the field and hopes for a different future. Where do we stand in
African studies? Has the field been transformed since the late 1990s?and
if so, how? Have we continued to suffer from perpetual crisis?or have
we built enduring bridges across continents, constituencies, and disciplines?
Has the militarism and strategic developmentalism of the cold war given
67
way to a more just and rigorous scholarship? All these questions need to be
raised and debated as we consider the relationships among African studies,
Jamie Monson
global studies, and the disciplines.
The picture today is a mixed one. We still have much, much more
work to do in order to build bridges between scholars and continents that
will be sustainable and enduring, for despite these perpetual calls for part-
nerships and collaboration, efforts have continued to be piecemeal and often
patronizing, originating from the needs and interests of Western scholars,
donors, and institutions. And we have not yet fully extended our partner-
ships to African studies institutions or stakeholders in the parts of the world
characterized as rising powers such as Brazil, India, and China, preferring to
study their activities on the continent, rather than to engage with them in
knowledge production.
And our energies are distracted as we deal with a new crisis facing
African studies today, the critical crisis of resources. The precipitous fall
in financial support from traditional foundation and government sources
over the last decade has affected research on African languages and in the
humanities and social sciences. Yet the end of the cold war has not resulted
in a demilitarization of research funding, as envisioned by scholars of the
1990s. On the contrary, expenditures by the Defense Department and the
State Department in international education for the study of Africa have
actually increased. Thus, there may indeed have been a decline in the capac-
ity for constructing and disseminating knowledge in African studies within
academic institutions of power, as some predicted. Yet there has been a
concomitant shift toward broader institutional support for African studies
that is strategic and military, more firmly located in Washington than in East
Lansing, Madison, and Los Angeles.4
Multiple Africas
While the resource crisis may look grim, I believe we have seen a hopeful
flourishing of multiple Africas, as Martin anticipated, in the new global
dimensions of the diaspora, as well as the potential engagement of global
partners in academic study. This multiplicity of Africas has exciting poten-
tial for the future recognition and revaluation of African studies, domesti-
africa TODAY 63(2)
cally and globally. When Dianna Shandy and I decided on the theme of Afri-
can Mobilities as program cochairs of the ASA annual meeting three years
ago, we could not have imagined the richness of the multidirectional flows
that were being observed, analyzed, and practiced by our member scholars.
And these mobilities are constructing new bridges while strengthening
existing ones.
The last couple of years have seen exciting new developments in stud-
68
ies of the African diaspora, as the field has focused on what Martin called
movements of Africans in the broadest sense. I believe that new diaspora
AFRICAN STUDIES: NEW DIREC TIONS, GLOBAL ENGAGEMENTS
studies are a promising frontier of the field. One example of this new research
focus is that of Cheikh Babou, a historian and MSU alumnus, whose work
traces the flows of people, faith practices, dress, and performance between
Senegal and Europe, in processes of reciprocal remittances that are not only
monetary, but also social and cultural.
In 2010, Paul Zeleza published in the African Studies Review an
article that summarized the results of a four-year project in African diaspora
studies. He sought to broaden the frame of African diaspora research and
analysis spatially and temporally. Visiting sixteen countries, he was espe-
cially interested in the histories of Afro-European and Afro-Asian diasporas,
the latter represented by the vibrant flourishing of Indian Ocean studies in
the last two decades. In the process, he offered a vigorous critique of the
Atlanticization of African mobility studies.5
As a scholar of the historical relationship between Africa and Asia, I
would like to broaden this important geography of mobility even further.
In my teaching and research, it is the connections between oceanic worlds
that I find to be most illuminating of the global African mobilities that we
call diasporas. The Afro-Atlantic world and the Afro-Asian world have not
constituted discrete regional networks separated by a nonnavigable land-
mass: rather, transoceanic circulations connected to African ports have
historically brought together material objects, people, and ideas, just as these
were refashioned and sent out again. And these circulations did not stop
at the coast, but moved from there into land-based transit networks that
crisscrossed the continent.
New research in archaeology in southern Africa, for example, pio-
neered by Ed Wilmsen and others, demonstrates that trade objects such as
ivory and glass beads circulated widely within the region and beyond its
borders across the oceans to the east and to the west. Ghislaine Lydon fol-
lows networks of trade from the West African Sahel across the Sahara using
traces of paper from that were left behind, the official and unofficial paper
economies that linked the caravan routes; her scholarship and that of others
bridges the still stubborn institutional divide between West African and
North African studies.
Objects like cowrie shells, arriving at port in the Red Sea, moved with
caravans across the Sudan to empires of the savannahs. Cowries are one
of the worlds oldest forms of currency, used in China as early as 3000bc.
Cowries were carried from their Indian Ocean home in the Maldives across
africa TODAY 63(2)

oceans and lands to all parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. By the
eleventh century, Ogundiran tells us, cowries had attained ornamental and
prestige status in West Africa. As ornaments, they became part of rituals and
chiefships; as ideas, they became key elements of oral narrative, potent as
references in imagination and in rumor.6
Labor history provides us with another example of mobilities of Afri-
cans and Asians in the precolonial world, where they came together over
69
time and space in what Vijay Prashad called a host of lineages. Much
of this history is a story of forced labor and forced migration, whether of
Jamie Monson
enslaved Africans or contracted labor from Asia. African sailors aboard Arab
sailing vessels astonished the residents of Guangzhou, China, in the twelfth
century when they swam deep underwater for long periods of timea skill
they may have honed as enslaved pearl divers in todays Dubai. In 1662, only
four years after establishing a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, Jan van
Riebeeck wrote to the Dutch East India Company asking the proprietors
to send Asian laborers. The nineteenth century saw multiple instances of
Chinese or Indian workers brought to plantation sugar economies through-
out the world, from the Caribbean to Mauritius to Natal, where they fre-
quently worked alongside Africans. The Caribbean remains one of the most
important sites of historical connection between Asia and Africa.
We could look to music and dance for other examples, thinking of
Chinese reggae stars from Jamaica in the 1960s or African hip-hop stars play-
ing the clubs of Dubai and Guangzhou today. We could look at the history
of so-called black rice between the Gambia and the Carolinas and Belize.7
This turn in African studies, like so many, is not new. Joseph Harris,
known for his lifetime commitment to the global experience of African
peoples, already in 1971 had completed a book titled The African Presence
in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade. Harris wrote about
African communities of India and Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi
Arabia. He went on to organize a community of scholars around themes
relating to the global African diaspora, including the Ruth Hamilton African
Diaspora Research Project at Michigan State University.8
Several points should be emphasized here. The first is that African
studies have cosmopolitan, global roots, which need stronger recognition;
the global turn is not new. And the fields of African area studies (including
the position of the Africanist as a post-WWII area expert) and African stud-
ies do not align: African studies is a much deeper, global, and cosmopolitan
field, despite consistent efforts to delimit it. Second, the dynamic trends in
African diasporic studies, the current focus on flows and circulations (not
to mention bottlenecks and frictions), and the breaking down of the barriers
between sub-Saharan and North Africa are all redefining where we are and
where we are going in African studies. And these directions are compatible
with a turn toward what I would call global African studies, a field that
embraces its past while opening new possibilities for future connection. The
question then would be: where in the university is there space for this field?
Is it going to be a single space, or multiple spaces? If there are to be multiple
africa TODAY 63(2)
spaces for it, how can they be creatively, productively, rigorously, and justly
linked? Is the version of this new field described in the provocation for this
symposium commensurable with what I have just described?
Global African Studies

70
The crisis in African studies from the 1990s emerged from many concerns,
among them the end of the cold war order and uncertainty about what might
follow. I believe that few of us at that time fully imagined the magnitude of
shifts that have taken place, from global neoliberalism and structural adjust-
ment to the multipolarity of world economic power. These reorientations
have contributed to the decentering of programs and paradigms located in the
North. But rather than viewing this as decline, I believe we are seeing fresh
possibilities for meaningful engagement in the production and dissemination
of knowledge among American, African, European, and Asian partners. We
are on the cusp of new opportunities for future directions.
The old debate was structured as area studies or global studies. What
we need today is global African studies. Let me use an example from my own
experience to illustrate this. At Michigan State University, we have a col-
laborative research project, Africa RISING, which focuses on technologies of
sustainability and intensification in Malawi. The project is funded by USAID
as part of its initiative on food security. What caught my attention first about
this project is how similar the project technology innovations (intercropping
legumes with maize and combining shrubby with low-growing vegetation)
are to historical practices of crop diversification that I have studied for
more than twenty years in southern Tanzania, and indeed to the intensive
practices of highland farmers in Kenyas Taita Hills, where I worked as a
horticulture volunteer in the Peace Corps in 1980.
What also struck me is the similarity between the intentions of this
projectseeking to improve food security and sustainability with support
from a government grantto a Chinese rice project in Tanzania that is
currently being evaluated by scholars from the Humanities and Develop-
ment College of the China Agricultural University in Beijing. That team is
investigating the failure of farmer extension at a Chinese smallholder rice
farm in Morogoro. The researchers have a strong grasp of the problems with
what they term Chinas agrarian technorationality, and with the history of
Chinas experience improving rice yields for rural farmers. What these young
researchers requested from me was guidance in how to develop their own
knowledge and practice in rural agrarian research in East Africa. They are
interested in a trilateral partnership that could link the agricultural devel-
opment research strengths of three institutions: MSU, Sokoine University,
and CAU.9
In the fall of 2014, I was invited to Peking University to attend a
pioneering international symposium on inclusive growth and agricultural
sustainability in Africa, a two-day event funded by the Gates Foundation
africa TODAY 63(2)

and Oxfam; out of a total of more than fifty presenters and participants,
only four of us were from the West. It was billed as a southsouth dialogue,
and participants had been included from such diverse stakeholders as civil-
society organizations in Africa, international NGO representatives, and
practitioners from multiple scales, including a Chinese sisal producer in
East Africa and a Kenyan urban farmer from Nairobi. A well-known Indian
specialist in so-called land-grabbing was also there. Deep conversations were
71
held over land issues, including a Congolese graduate student who talked
about the role of conflict in land loss, a black consciousness activist from
Jamie Monson
Grahamstown, South Africa, who spoke of postapartheid legal entangle-
ments, and a Chinese agricultural economist who promoted productivity as
the most critical issue facing Africa today. It was an exciting and invigorating
dialogue, which has now been carried forward into collaborative research,
publication, and practice.
This experience in Beijing gave me a vision of what is needed in global
African studies today and what is possible. Bringing together diverse stake-
holders who are practitioners, researchers, activists, and policymakers in
global dialogue gave an opening for conversations to take place that do not
normally have such a forum. The Globa North was decentered in terms of
representation, and the sponsors, while present as funders, were not at all
immune from critique and scrutiny. On the contrary, the Gates Foundation
came under heavy criticism (by an American intellectual) for its definition
of a smallholder, and throughout the event, the Gates Chinese representa-
tive, as well as the Oxfam delegates from Africa and Asia, engaged in debate
and dialogue.
The Way Forward
As scholars in African studies, we must think first and foremost about

how our own knowledge production will make connections with the
work of our African colleagues and their institutions, connections that
will strengthen and sustain us together. We can no longer afford to see
Africa as a research site from which to obtain data for our own research
needs: indeed, it is surprising that this continues to be the case after years
of hand-wringing, and the persistence of this phenomenon requires our
dedicated investigation.
We must further reach out to and recognize the energies and concerns
of Africans in multiple contexts, including the critical role they have played
establishing transcontinental links, for example as the African Studies
Association is now doing with its African Diaspora Fellowship Program.
And we can welcome, rather than shrink from, relationships with new
global partners, such as China, India, and Brazil, which are rapidly increasing
their engagement in Africa, as well as their own African studies scholarly
initiatives. In short, there is much, much more work to do if we are to
make stronger and more lasting partnerships. We must recenter scholarship
africa TODAY 63(2)
in Africa while building bridges across continents. We need to have a new

activist agenda to promote public support and educate both those who can
make a difference in Africa, as Sandra Greene admonished us, alongside
those (globally) who are still not yet aware of the ways that Africa is part
and parcel of the how they live, how they identify themselves and others.
72
Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Science and Technology

What the young researchers from China Agricultural University feel they
are missing is the long-term, ethnographic, and historical experience (and
language skills) that could inform their understanding of research materials
they encounter and assist them to engage with local partners. Their example
clearly illustrates the importance of multidisciplinary approaches in African
studies research, dissemination, and outreach, for the perceived boundaries
between traditional fields of African studies (language and culture), applied
fields (social sciences, in the view of Robert Bates), and schools of agriculture,
medicine, education, and business are false ones.
As a historian, I will argue forcefully that we turn away from the
humanities at our peril: when the study of language, culture, and meaning is
diminished, all disciplines are diminished. One look at the recently released
American Council of Learned Societies report on the Humanities in Africa
will confirm this. But at the same time, we all need to cross the campus more
often. We need to institutionalize and structure strong relationships among
scholars of diverse disciplines, including not only humanities and social
science, but also soil science, hydrology, higher education, animal science,
and more, focusing on our institutional strengths.
Inclusivity and Outreach
Outreach in African studies refers to going outcreating work that is

grounded in Africas realities while making the findings relevant in the larger
world. As Africanists, we are charged with what Atieno Odhiambo called the
meaning and challenge of building on the indigenous, and with dissemina-
tion toward those who can make a difference. It means sharing knowledge
and experience with those who do not yet know much about Africa or that
Africa is part and parcel of who they are and how they live, to return to
Sandra Greenes admonition as ASA president.
At the same time, outreach means bringing in, in the sense of inclu-
sivity. Making the borders of the university and the academy more porous
has always been an intention of African studies outreach programs that seek
to foster positive, sustaining relationships with the broader community.
Positive engagement programs recognize the surrounding communitys
knowledge, expertise, and resources, and they cross the boundaries of the
ivory tower in both directions.
africa TODAY 63(2)

Last, outreach and dissemination are leaping ahead in the area of
the digital humanities, with community- as well as university-generated
web-based projects, such as the African history podcasts (Past and Pres-
ent) created through Michigan State Universitys Matrix Project. These are
available digitally all across the world through H-Net. Digital environments
can provide inclusive space for collaborative adventures across boundaries,
whether they are boundaries of campuses or continents.
73
Outreach always seems to come at the end of discussions of African
studies programs, and as a former outreach director myself (during my gradu-
Jamie Monson
ate years at UCLA), I have felt the marginalization of this role. This should
not be the case! If we are to build strong constituencies, construct and dis-
seminate knowledge, and make enduring bridges with African and global
communities, outreach needs to be relocated at the heart of our African
studies vision.
Conclusion
When I was a graduate student at UCLA, one of my African history profes-

sors was the late Nigerian scholar Boniface Obichere. I was the teaching
assistant for his survey of West African history, which he typically began
by telling his students that the West African sense of time is a circular one:
earlier generations may come back to play a role in the present and in the
future. The past in the future, the return narrative, sankofathese
themes have also emerged in this essay. My own investigation of them has
revealed for me the pan-African roots of our field, as well as the complexity
of its global dimensions.
Embracing the roots is critical for moving forward. Our roots at MSU
include a long-term and ongoing commitment to partnership in Africa,
starting from the beginning with the University of Nigeria in Nsukka.
These are partnerships that were sustained during challenging times, for
example, during conflict in Ethiopia; they are enduring bridges. Additionally,
the MSU traditions of ethical practice and socially engaged scholarship are
well-known, including the archival repository for African activist materials
in our library. MSUs latest initiative, the Alliance for African Partnership,
promises to build on this tradition as we embark on a ten-year commitment
to cocreate partnership models that will bring innovative solutions to the
challenges we all face.
I believe the future of African studies will include and build on our
pasts, as we coconstruct knowledge production and dissemination that
is just, rigorous, engaged, and global. As scholars in African studies, we
must think first and foremost about how our own knowledge production
will make connections with the work of our African colleagues and their
institutions, connections that will strengthen and sustain us together.
We must further reach out to and recognize the energies and concerns
africa TODAY 63(2)
of Africans in multiple contexts, including the critical role they have played
as transcontinental and transoceanic links, for example as the African Stud-
ies Association and the Carnegie Foundation are now doing with the African
Diaspora Fellowship Program.
And we can welcome, rather than shrink from, relationships with new
global partners as China, India, and Brazil are rapidly increasing their engage-
ment in Africa, as well as expanding their own historically grounded African
74
studies scholarly initiatives. In short, there is much, much more work to do

if we are to make stronger and more lasting partnerships. We must recenter
scholarship in Africa while building bridges across continents. We need to

have a new activist agenda that will promote public support and educate
both those who can make a difference in Africa and those who are still not
yet aware of the ways that Africa is part and parcel of who they are and how
they live.10 And we are in the exciting era of truly global African studies as
we recognize and engage with not one, but many Africas.
NOTES
1. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, The Perpetual Solitudes and Crises of African Studies in the United
States, Africa Today 44(2) (1997): 193210.
2. Sandra E. Greene, Symbols and Social Activism: An Agenda for African Studies and the ASA
for the 21st Century, African Studies Review 42(2) (1999): 114.
3. William Martin and Michael West, The Decline of the Africanists Africa and the Rise of New
Africas,Issue: A Journal of Opinion 23(1) (1995): 2426.
4. James Pritchett, Response: Funding Challenges and Opportunities in African Studies Research,
African Studies Association, 2 February 2014, http://www.africanstudies.org/publications/asa
-news/winter-2014/311-response-funding-challenges-and-opportunities-in-african-studies
-research.
5. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, African Diasporas: Toward a Global History, African Studies Review 53(1)
(2010): 119.
6. Akinwumi Ogundiran, Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Transla-
tions of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland, International Journal of African Historical Studies,
35(2/3) (2002): 42757.
7. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections the Myth of Cultural
Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)
8. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
9. Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971).
10. Xiuli Xu, Xiaoyun Li, Gubo Qi, Lixia Tang, and Langton Mukwereza, Science, Technology, and
the Politics of Knowledge: The Case of Chinas Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centers
in Africa, World Development 81(May) (2016): 8291.
11. Greene, ASA Presidential Address.
africa TODAY 63(2)

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African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements

Author(s): Jamie Monson

The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies:

africa TODAY 63(2)

africa TODAY 63(2)

Global African Studies

africa TODAY 63(2)

The Way Forward

As scholars in African studies, we must think first and foremost about

in Africa while building bridges across continents. We need to have a new

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Science and Technology

Inclusivity and Outreach

Outreach in African studies refers to going outcreating work that is

africa TODAY 63(2)

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, one of my African history profes-

studies scholarly initiatives. In short, there is much, much more work to do

scholarship in Africa while building bridges across continents. We need to

africa TODAY 63(2)

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