Paper short abstract:

This paper reconstructs the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies, by the displacement of an older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa, the founding of the ASA in 1957 and by the recolonization of knowledge production in Africa in the postcolonial era

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the racial politics of knowledge production about Africa in the US, with a focus on the history of the African Studies Association. (It is a revised and shortened version of the lecture I delivered at the ASA's 60th anniversary meeting.) In it, I make three basic points. The first is that the privileging of white scholarship was hard-wired into the ASA at its founding with the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa. Secondly, that displacement was intended by those who founded the ASA to sever permanently any connections between an emerging African American Studies and African Studies. My third point is that long before #RhodesMustFall the decolonization of knowledge production was at the forefront of struggles across the continent. Indeed, there was a moment in the mid-sixties when it appeared that the balance of power over knowledge production might shift decisively from colonial studies of Africa or, in Hountondji's words, "the externalization of African Studies," back to the continent itself. That Africa-centered project of decolonization was severely compromised by a host of internal and external forces, while at precisely the same time, there was a massive influx of Cold War-related funding to African studies in the USA. Thus funded and fortified, African Studies in the US did not assist in the recentering of knowledge production in postcolonial African institutions, but rather expedited the "rapid recolonization" - American style - of knowledge production about Africa, beginning in the late 1960s