From the issue dated May 19, 2000

Black Studies 101: Introductory Courses Reflect a Field Still Defining Itself A canon evolves amid approaches that are literary, feminist, cultural, Afrocentric, and more By ALISON SCHNEIDER The black-studies curriculum is perhaps better defined by what it's not than what it is. It's not tidy. It has no clear boundaries. Unlike, say, economics or chemistry, there ALSO SEE: Taking Black Studies Back to the Streets Black Studies 101: a Sampling of Approaches Africana Studies 4900, 'Cyberspace and the Black Experience,' at U. of Toledo is no obvious progression of knowledge. And while there are a few common themes -- like slavery and migration -- there are few common texts or philosophies when it comes to the foundational course in the field. Take your average introductory course in black studies, for example, during a week at the end of April. At Ohio State University, Dred Scott is the man of the hour. At Duke University, they're reading Paul Beatty's 1997 novel, The White Boy Shuffle. Over at the University of Pennsylvania, Paul Robeson and C.L.R. James are front and center. And at New York University, they're talking about panAfricanism and the "postcolonial present." As for the theories behind the courses, well, they're all over the map, too. The Ohio State class is chronological with a literary bent. Duke's take: cultural studies. The Penn course filters everything through a W.E.B. Du Bois lens. And N.Y.U. combines pan-Africanism with urban studies. There's a reason 30 years after the discipline developed that people still wonder whether the black-studies curriculum represents a coherent subject or a smorgasbord. For all the programs and scholarship, black-studies professors still haven't reached a consensus about what to teach or how to teach it. In fact, there isn't even consensus on who should teach the foundational course. Some institutions fob the class off on adjuncts; Harvard University assigns it to a star like Cornel West. Black Studies 101 is a portrait in miniature of the intellectual debates and ideological divisions that dominate the field. The discipline's strengths (its eclectic, expansive, experimental curricula) and its weaknesses (its eclectic, expansive, experimental curricula) are on full display in the one course intended to provide a unified view of disunity. "In traditional fields, the content of the intro course is more imposed on a faculty member by departmental expectations and by the traditions in the field," explains James B. Stewart, president of the National Council for Black Studies and a professor of labor studies and African and African-American studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. It's another ball game entirely in black studies, Mr. Stewart notes. Some intro courses take an Afrocentric approach; others are feminist. Some focus on the diaspora; others center on black people in the United States. And then there are courses with no obvious orientation at all. In an introductory economics class, "I'm laying out received wisdom. Part of what goes on in an intro-to-black-studies course is a working out of what the field is," he says. It's tough to achieve commonality in the introductory course when a lot of the people teaching it don't even converse. Scholars at less-competitive institutions, particularly those with an Afrocentric bent, attend different conferences (the annual meeting of the National Council for Black Studies), write for different publications (like the Journal of Black Studies), and position themselves within entirely different political camps than, say, some of their Ivy League counterparts, who favor the standard disciplinary meetings and periodicals. People of different ideological stripes even have their own textbooks. The most popular in the Afrocentric camp is Introduction to Black Studies (University of Sankore Press, 1993), by Maulana Karenga, the chairman of black studies at California State University at Long Beach. Mr. Karenga's book, as the preface says, is "self-consciously Afrocentric," and "demands that Black Studies root itself in the African experience." But in courses with a cultural-studies, literary, or pan-African bent, there usually is no textbook at all. The reading lists for those courses tend to be a mix of primary texts, assembled according to the interests of the professor teaching the course. Take the introductory class at Washington University in St. Louis, currently taught by Rafia Zafar, the director of African and Afro-American studies there. She has a strength in the humanities, an interest in the fine arts, and a scholarly focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her syllabus reflects that. What are the key books? Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (W.W. Norton, 1999), by Deborah Gray White; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Pantheon Books, 1998), by Angela Y. Davis; By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (University Press of Virginia, 1991), by John Michael Vlach; Mules and Men, by Zora Neale Hurston; and Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Ms. Zafar's course moves from gender to folklore, from food and fashion to music and art, from historical underpinnings to literary expression. "The introductory course provides a series of ways of looking at Afro-American culture," Ms. Zafar explains. "The intro I think of as a feast." But some people worry there's a famine. The highly individualized nature of the foundational course leaves more than a few scholars hungry for consistency. "Black-studies programs lack a foundation," says Theophile Obenga, the chairman of the department at San Francisco State University. "We do everything -- the diaspora, sex, history, language, economics, race. We don't have a paradigm. That is why we don't make progress." Things have progressed at San Francisco State, the birthplace of the first black-studies department. Back in 1968, hundreds of students went on strike to demand a College of Ethnic Studies. People there are still talking politics -- but this time in the classroom, not on the Commons, where bloody melees between students and police broke out during the protests. The students in San Francisco's introductory black-studies course -- part of a department with an Afrocentric view -- are working their way through the Karenga book, and on a recent spring day, the topic is politics. What is politics? (Answer: "the art and process of gaining, maintaining and using power.") What are the key forms of state power? (Answer: "institutions of dominance," e.g., the police and courts; and "institutions of political socialization," e.g., the school system.) "Education is used to advance the ideas of those who rule," says Samuel Harvell, the adjunct instructor teaching the class. "We've talked about the omissions and distortions of U.S. education. Can we say that the way people are socialized to learn about American history is based primarily on a Eurocentric educational system?" But politics is just one week out of his course. The semester is an academic speed-walk through the origins of black studies, slavery and capitalism, the civil-rights movement, nationalism, the church, gender, music, and race relations. "The goal of black studies is to rewrite history to present a more accurate portrayal of the African-American experience," Mr. Harvell explains in an interview. There are so many myths that need to be debunked, Mr. Harvell adds, like the notion that the Black Panther party was a terrorist group that threatened national security. "We learn that this was essentially a myth constructed to demean the Black Panthers. People don't know that the Black Panther party started free lunch programs, free medical programs." He makes sure to teach that. That's exactly what black-studies scholars should be doing, says Laura D. Head, a professor in the San Francisco State department. "People don't want us talking about ancient Egypt, white racism, or melanin. Melanin gets people real upset," she says -- not all that surprising given that melanin theories equate human characteristics with skin color, something many scientists dismiss. But the field must give students "an accurate understanding of black culture. If that gets us in trouble with the powers that be, so be it." It has drawn fire. In 1997, John H. Bunzel, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University and a former president of San Jose State University, co-wrote an article in The Public Interest that took a hard look at San Francisco's department. He didn't like what he saw. Christianity was described as a "white supremacy religion." Another professor said white female abolitionists opposed slavery merely because it encouraged concubinage. After observing classes over a number of years, Mr. Bunzel determined that the department took "an adversarial stance toward American life," and promulgated "a doctrine of black cultural superiority." Ms. Head calls the slams "typical." But how typical is San Francisco State? "My sense is that a good part of what took place is not necessarily the norm," Mr. Bunzel says in a recent interview. The introductory course in black studies at the University of Maryland at College Park certainly looks different. On the agenda at Maryland: hip-hop, economics, and black postindustrial youth culture. Francille Rusan Wilson, the director of undergraduate Afro-American studies at Maryland, kicks off a lecture with a discussion of art and entrepreneurship. Commercials for sneakers and soda make the crumbling urban landscape -- full of handsome black men playing basketball -- look romantic, Ms. Wilson says, as she explains an article by N.Y.U.'s Robin D.G. Kelley. But there's something, she says, that those commercials don't show -- the police cruisers, the cashiers behind bullet-proof shields, the metal detectors in schools. Too many black citizens wind up working in the "underground economy" -- drugs, prostitution, or dealing in stolen goods, she says. A lucky few end up as musicians. Ms. Wilson flicks on a videotaped interview with the hip-hop artist KRS-One. "Because you stole our music, we're going to steal your music, and get paid. That's rap music, and everything else is bullshit," the musician proclaims. That's Ms. Wilson's segue into a discussion about "getting paid for playing." Rap and hip-hop criticize capitalism, but they also embrace consumerism, she observes. "As jobs disappear, people want to be paid for playing." Ms. Wilson lightens the mood with a snippet of "Bustin' Loose," by the "king of go-go," Chuck Brown. "Turn it up!" a student from the back of the lecture hall bellows. "I have an outcome-based approach to this class," Ms. Wilson says later. By the end of the course, Ms. Wilson wants her students to understand that black studies is interdisciplinary and that it should be anti-essentialist. "There's not one way to be black or to study black people," Ms. Wilson says. She also wants her students to examine the transformation of African culture in the Americas, to grasp the core values of black culture -- namely, self-determination, education, resistance, and freedom -- and to see race as a social construct. Her course takes a thematic approach to the field, tackling gender and sexuality, the color line, and culture and economics. And her readings span the academic spectrum, touching on the classics -- Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Audre Lorde, to name a few -- and contemporary voices in the field -- Angela Davis, Tricia Rose, and Manning Marable, among them. Although Ms. Wilson covers different theoretical orientations in her class, the overarching approach of her program is unmistakably feminist. "We introduce gender, sex, and family in the core course," says Rhonda Williams, the director of the program and someone who has taught the introductory class. "Everything is gendered from the beginning." That's a far cry from the Afrocentric approach of San Francisco State, the urban-studies leaning at N.Y.U., or the diaspora orientation at Duke. But that doesn't trouble Ms. Wilson: "The discipline is quite alive, and the differences indicate that." But some people just find them troubling. "Standardization means that the discipline exists," says Abdul Alkalimat, the director of Africana studies at the University of Toledo. There has to be "intellectual coherence" from one institution to the next, he adds. "A course with the same name has to be understandable to the rest of the people in the profession." Professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison couldn't agree more. "In the 70's, there was all sorts of bad press about black studies," says William L. Van Deburg, the chairman of the curriculum committee in Wisconsin's department of Afro-American studies. "People were saying, 'These scholars don't have any focus.' We wanted to make sure that people looking at the credentials of students majoring in this department would be able to understand what they were doing." Wisconsin's solution: to scrap its "Introduction to Afro-American Studies" and require, instead, three separate foundational courses, in history, social sciences, and the arts. But places like Wisconsin -- or Cornell and Yale Universities -- that don't try to synthesize the totality of the black experience in a single course are missing the boat, says Ronald W. Bailey, a professor of African-American studies at Northeastern University. "Black people didn't lead their lives so they would be neat and clean for the literature people on Monday and the history people on Tuesday." Multidisciplinarity has been the name of the game since the early 80's, when the National Council for Black Studies started trying to standardize the curriculum. Now it's trying once again, hoping to promote a curriculum that will incorporate some of the recent scholarly advances in areas such as black feminist studies, ancient Africa, the diaspora, media studies, and science. Some scholars are also hoping to fix what they see as the broken connection between the black-studies curriculum and black neighborhoods. Black-studies majors at institutions like the University of Massachusetts at Amherst used to do internships in nearby Springfield, and professors often based their research there, says Earnest Allen, the associate chairman of the department. "There was a marriage of theory and practice," Mr. Allen explains. "We can't do that today. We don't have the time or resources." Some programs are making the time. At Georgia State University, students in the introductory course are required to do 15 hours of volunteer work in black neighborhoods. "Our goal is to produce students who have some sense of social responsibility," says Akinyele O. Umoja, an assistant professor who teaches the course. Toledo's Mr. Alkalimat thinks the Internet can carry that spirit even further. He wants to use technology to build bibliographies, foster conversations across programs, and to "turn ideologies into information." The Internet "offers a basis to organize knowledge, so that consensus can emerge on what there is to know." Actually, there already is more consensus than people think, Mr. Alkalimat adds. He just finished looking at three of the key anthologies in the field: African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources (Temple University Press, 1996), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W.W. Norton, 1996), and Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Their respective editors: Molefi Kete Asante and Abu S. Abarry; Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay; and Manning Marable and Leith Mullings. Mr. Asante, Mr. Gates, and Mr. Marable aren't exactly kindred spirits, intellectually speaking. They come at black studies from different directions. Mr. Asante is an Afrocentrist. Mr. Gates is a literary and cultural critic. And Mr. Marable is a historian with a leftist bent. They write for entirely different audiences. But Mr. Alkalimat did some math. Out of 4,000 pages and some 300 selections, the three books have 14 texts in common. Mr. Alkalimat is not discouraged. Fourteen texts, he says, is more than enough to begin building a canon. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A20 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article