Reconceptualizing Intellectual Histories of Africana Studies: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Properly understood, Africana Studies is a stand-alone "discipline." One that goes beyond, and disengages the normative boundaries and understandings of Western disciplinarity. This work is premised on such an understanding of autonomy. It reifies such a proposition by compiling scholarly literature on the subject of Africana intellectual traditions as a point of departure for articulating a rationale for viewing Africana Studies' disciplinary history as inclusive of the expansive tradition of Africana intellectual thought. It posits several generations of thinkers associated broadly with what can be referred to as Africana Studies have determined that African intellectual traditions should influence and often provide the methodological direction for disciplinary Africana Studies. It assembles much of the literature that attempts to contextualize disciplinarity firstly, and then those that theorize connections of Africana Studies disciplinary work to intellectual traditions arising out of the African experience. Through a process of culling the intellectual commitments of Western structures of knowledge from general intellectual historical texts and other disciplinary histories, this work situates its development of communities of thought and their academic and ideological legacies. From there it assesses how Africana thinkers understood these knowledge formations, a process Cedric Robinson considers to be the beginnings of a Black intelligentsia. The combination of all these reviewed literatures will be analyzed to reveal why and how, if at all, Africana thinkers have developed work that contributes to the construction of its own disciplinary space--with its concomitant methodological considerations.