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Contribution short abstract:

The paper intends to bridge Eurocentric and Afrocentric approaches to African studies. The author argues that African scholarship should contribute to the understanding of other societies and not only the study of Africa and its diasporas.

Contribution long abstract:

In the wave of the decolonization of academic knowledge, there has been a critique of Eurocentric perspectives on the African continent as well as an anti-decolonisation stance (Táíwò, 2022). Africanists and African scholars call for the study of the African continent from within rather than from the outside, the study of African diasporas as well as the promotion of pan-African studies and Afrocentric perspectives. Whereas these propositions will indubiously add value to our knowledge about the continent, I argue that African studies need more than Afrocentric perspectives. African studies need Eurocentric and Afrocentric knowledge as much as they need whatever-centric views. The future of African studies is in its openness and its connection to other studies. Moreover, I suggest that African scholars should contribute to the study and understanding of other societies. African scholarship possesses a great and overlooked potential to say something about Africa and the world. The Negritude movement offers a good illustration of the contribution of African thinking and theory to our understanding of societal challenges beyond the African continent. This paper discusses some ideas about how African studies and its teaching could further contribute to academic knowledge at large.