This lecture was delivered on February 3, 2026, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada) for the monthly series “Black History and the Project of Black Studies.”
In the late 1990s, before I began my graduate studies, I spent a year in Ghana. It was there, in Accra, that I had my first explicit education in the politics of Pan-Africanism and transnational Black social and cultural cooperation. I had met a group of Ghanaian youth, young men and women, who had identified themselves as members of the All- African Peoples Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). They told me that they had a weekly study group and invited me to participate. I accepted their invitation, not knowing what to expect. When I arrived at the meeting one Sunday afternoon, they had already begun their discussion. Members of the group greeted me warmly and I took a seat in the corner of the room and listened in. They were discussing W. E. B. DuBois’s book The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History –the landmark study, published in January, 1947, by the great African American scholar who, I would later learn, had lived out his final years in Ghana and was buried in Accra.
This was my first introduction to DuBois’s book and the first time I came to know his work beyond a U.S. context, being more familiar with classic studies like The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction. The discussion in the A-APRP reading group was engaged and lively. It not only covered the contents of the book, but also the historical and political context of both the book’s thesis and the political economy of its production. The discussion was also an attempt to come to terms with what members believed to be DuBois’s “colonialist” representation of Africa even as they were trying to extract some Pan-Africanist ideological wisdom from it. By the end of the discussion, group members had decided that a good follow-up book from the A-APRP reading list would be Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).
I learned a lot from these A-APRP reading-group meetings. I was introduced to a number of key Pan-Africanist texts. We watched and discussed films such as Sam Greenlee’s underground classic The Spook Who Sat by the Door (about a Black US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent who uses his training to lead a guerrilla insurrection in Chicago). And I participated in a set of ongoing ideological debates on the nature of a global Black cultural, economic, and political cooperation.
Before my encounter with its Ghana chapter, I did not know much about the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). I soon learned that it was a party established to “combat the forces oppressing Africans worldwide” in a struggle for equality while uniting them through a revolutionary Pan-Africanism. Originally called for the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, in his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, A-APRP came into existence through the efforts of Kwame Touré, the Trinidad-born, Bronx-raised U.S. civil rights and Black Power movement activist formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. Under Touré’s direction and leadership, the party expanded throughout the African continent and the Black world. Ghana’s A-APRP chapter, it was explained to me, was devoted to the teachings of Nkrumah, Sekou Touré (the first president of Guinea), and Kwame Touré, and the Party worked toward African unity (as defined by Pan-Africanism). Ghanaian party members, similar to other members throughout the Black world, also sought to maintain a balanced lifestyle of work and study.
My engagement with the Ghanaian chapter of A-APRP had a profound effect on my understanding of the continued significance of knowledge of a Black history that encompassed the linked experiences of Black people on the African continent and those in the African diaspora (or, what we would call the Black world). This engagement with A-APRP also revealed the necessity, in the face of ongoing global white supremacy, to struggle for Black self-determination on a global scale.
But I soon realized that for decades, this understanding of the Black world – the Pan-Africanist view of the Black experience – had not been part of the conceptualization of what came to be known as “Black Studies.” Sure, there have always been and continue to be groups such as the A-APRP who understood the interconnectedness of the Black world, and carried out the legacy of Pan-Africanism through study, practice, and activism. These groups have existed – and continue to exist – on the African continent and throughout the African diaspora. However, their existence does not represent the institutionalization of the studies of global Black populations in the university. With the institutionalization of Black Studies, Pan-Africanism, as a framework for understanding the interlinked experiences of Africans and people of African descent through the joint histories of enslavement, colonization, and racialization – seemed no longer central. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a clear split: Black Studies on the one hand, and African Studies on the other. Within that split, a new formulation, “African diaspora Studies,” was included under the umbrella of “Black Studies.” In other words, we had African Studies as a distinct field of study, and Black Studies as another distinct field of study –or, we might say, Africa was intellectually and academically cut off from what was deemed the Black World.
Of course, it was not always this way. Early intellectual studies of Black populations took as a point of departure the intertwined, dynamic, and living relationships of those on the African continent, and those Black communities situated outside of the continent. There was a long history of research that sought to redress not only the long-standing racist representations of African people and people of African descent – but that also contributed to the fight against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation and dispossession. In other words, these early studies – such as The Negro by W. E. B. DuBois, An African Background Outline by Carter G. Woodson (both African Americans), So Spoke the Uncle by the Haitian anthropologist, Jean Pris Mars, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” by Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg, An African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robinson, etc. -- emerged against the context of European imperialism and the consequent exploitation of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. They were, in other words, Pan-Africanist, seeking to both vindicate and liberate global Black populations. Both a political and intellectual project, Pan-Africanism sought to expose the similar conditions of Black communities throughout the world. Central to this understanding of the similarity of Black continental and Black diaspora experience is the very real history of slavery, colonialism, and attendant negative racialization. Early Black scholars saw the European trade in Africans, the institution of slavery, and formal colonialism of the African continent as part of the same historical arc that established the modern political, racial, and economic hierarchy with Black people as a group, anywhere and everywhere, at the bottom of every scale.
Invoked at the beginning of the twentieth century by a group of intellectuals, professionals, and politicians from the Caribbean, North America, and the African continent, Pan-Africanism was dedicated to the liberation of worldwide Black populations, calling for the end of racism in the post-emancipation communities of the Americas, and the destruction of colonialism and imperialism on the African continent.
So how did Black Studies, which in its earlier articulations conceived of the entire global Black populations as a linked set of communities where the histories and experiences of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid together formed a unified narrative of identity, transform into a split endeavor of African Studies vs Black Studies? The objective of my talk today is to provide an outline sketch of the development of African Studies and Black Studies as two distinct fields of academic study by presenting a historical context for the split. In this historical context we will see how, after 1945, a set of realities emerged on the African continent and in the Black diaspora in which: 1) the political exigencies of the time – anticolonial movements in Africa and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the US – meant rising nationalism was cherished over transnational connections; 2) rise of the U.S. as a global hegemon and the emergence of “area studies” in the west transformed what the study of Africa into a discrete entity called “African Studies.” What this meant, specifically, was that the “Black Studies” that emerged (in the U.S., in particular) was nationalist rather than Pan-Africanist. And this Black Studies was distinct from “African Studies” – which was institutionalized through US and western foreign policy demands.
In their 1999 volume, Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa, editors William G. Martin and Michael O. West explore three distinct traditions of African studies: “Africanist,” “continental,” and “transcontinental.” The “Africanist” tradition brings together the European and North American studies of Africa that begin with European colonial rule of the continent and expand in the post–World War II period with the elevation of North American Africanists. I must also quickly point to small distinctions in the landscape of Africanist tradition led by the white west. For the British and French in particular, colonialism structured the study of Africa and Africans. And while the French had already established a Société des Africanistes by 1930. The role of anthropology, criticized as a handmaiden to colonialism, must be pointed out here as the discipline’s development in Europe depended directly on its theories culled from research for colonial rule. As the early “science of race,” anthropology was particularly responsible for giving “scientific” credence to racial theories of white superiority and Black (and nonwhite) inferiority.
The Africanist Tradition, that is, the white, western-controlled tradition of scholarship about Africa, provides my first example of this split in the study of global Black populations. The Africanist Tradition has held near-hegemonic status over the study of Africa since the last half of the twentieth century. Emerging in the 1950s in the context of U.S. ascendancy as a global superpower, the institution of African Studies in the U.S. - and white rule over that institution - comes directly from US (and western) Cold War politics, the formation of the global US security apparatus, and the desire to exert influence and control over newly-decolonizing countries. “Area Studies” emerged at this moment and African Studies (that is, the racialized study of “sub-Saharan” or Black Africa) was quickly one of those areas of focus. The US government set up nine major African Studies Centers in elite all-white universities, including UCLA, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern. These African Studies centers were well-funded by the US government (through the National Defense Education Act) and wealthy foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford. The centers supported the intellectual needs of US empire. As historian Paul Zeleza asserts, the purpose of US African Studies was to reinforce the national security imperative of knowledge production about Africa. African studies also became white. And it is no secret that many of these white Africanists, especially social scientists, worked with the US State Department – and some with the CIA.
White money and white power enabled the triumph of the white Africanists’ “Africa” in the white academy. African Studies, housed in well-funded white universities, marginalized Black institutions. Well-funded white academics excluded Black scholars, training and hiring their own in an unending cycle of white supremacist social reproduction. White academics (from North America and Europe) continue to dominate the field of African Studies.
But before the US State Department established white African Studies, Black scholars and activists (in Africa and throughout the Black World) pioneered the study of Africa. This would be what Martin and West called the “Transcontinental tradition.” The work of Black intellectuals including Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Alain Locke, Arturo Schomburg, John Henrik Clarke, and many, many others have been bleached out by the white usurpers of African Studies. As a result, there has been a shift in the politics and objectives of the study of Africa. Black liberation was removed from the research agenda. Moreover, the Africanist tradition’s presumed concern with “scientific objectivity” in the post-1950s study of Africa was area- and region- specific and encouraged intense and focused specialization on “tribes” or “ethnics” within the continent (the “sub-saharan” part), often at the expense of structural analysis of race, imperialism, and white supremacy. Black people were transformed into objects of study by white Africanists.
In fact, a quick story, a Canadian story, will demonstrate the impact of the white takeover of African Studies – of the power of the Africanist Tradition.
On October 16, 1969, a group of Black students interrupted the opening plenary session of the joint meeting of the Association of African Studies (ASA) and the Canadian Committee on African Studies (CAS) in Montreal. In the presence of 1,700 conference participants, the students took the microphone and castigated the ASA for its colonialist and racist practices. The students condemned “the intellectual arrogance of white people which has perpetuated and legitimized a kind of academic colonialism and has distorted the definition of the natural and cultural life and social organization of African peoples.” They described the ASA as “invalid” and “illegitimate” and declared the conference suspended until their charges were resolved.
As the Black Caucus proceeded to disrupt other conference sessions over the next two days, they demanded, among other things, that the ASA and the CAS make clear their opposition to colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, and that these organizations should be transformed to serve Black liberation. In response, the Canadian Committee on African Studies withdrew from the conference (perhaps because there was no racism in Canada?).
The Black Caucus then presented a motion to the ASA demanding the creation of a new board with full racial parity. Later, it would be revealed that “only twenty percent favored racial parity for Blacks [sic] and whites on the ASA Board, while others advocated a ‘non-racial policy.’” The Black Caucus of the African Studies Association was formed a year earlier, in 1968, at the annual conference in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Black scholars and students, from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S., questioned not only why so many whites had suddenly become interested in studying Africa, but why they held powerful, decision-making positions in the field of African Studies.
But the transcontinental, Pan-Africanist, tradition was also overshadowed by the emergence and institutionalization of the discipline of Black Studies within white U.S. institutions. Black Studies emerged from the flames of the fight for liberation – the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. But by the time of the institutionalization of Black in the late 1960s, it came after decades of major transformation in the US Black community, that included, among other things, the fragmentation of the US Black radical Left, the emergence of McCarthyism (McCarthyism being the extreme political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and groups and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on US institutions), and the rise of Cold War liberalism.
In particular, the fragmentation of the Black radical Left in the post World War II period reflects ongoing generational shifts in the political orientation of U.S Black political leadership. In the period before World War II, Black scholars and activists in the US sought to create a global movement for Black emancipation by explicitly and continuously linking Jim Crow racism with imperialism. Discussions about US racism occurred alongside those about colonialism and were set within a broader understanding of the “global system of empire and racial capitalism that exploited and appropriated the land, labor, and bodies of black people ‘scattered all over the world’” (69). Although it was a movement spearheaded by a small and outnumbered group of Black scholar-activists, this tradition of Black Studies nevertheless attained wide popularity among Black populations in the United States and internationally immediately after the war. But this powerful moment in Black radicalism did not survive the Cold War, however. By the early 1950s, in the shadow of the Cold War and of rising McCarthyism, two prominent camps emerged in U.S Black scholar-activist and political circles. On the one side were the intellectuals who professed a radical antiracism by continuing the broad critique of colonialism and imperialism and by insisting that diaspora Blacks, Africans, and all colonized people shared a common history of oppression. On the other side were those who, both purposely and unwittingly, embraced the language and framing of Cold War liberalism in a seeming effort to improve the specific domestic condition of U.S Blacks.
These shifts in U.S. Black political rhetoric and strategy were very much aided by the long and powerful reach of the state. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, international political maneuvers among U.S. Blacks still oppressed by Jim Crow were a liability—especially previous and potential alliances with African liberation groups and other anti-imperialist movements. An example is the Council on African Affairs (or the CAA). The CAA was an organization that was known for its radical anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. Among its members were Paul Robeson, the most famous African American actor, scholar, and activist in the world, and the Pan-Africanist scholar, W. E. B. DuBois. In its advocacy, the Council on African Affairs linked the fight for African decolonization to the struggle for civil rights in the United states, stating: “our fight for negro rights here [in the United states] is inseparably linked with the liberation movements of people of the Caribbean and Africa and the colonial world in general.” For its political orientation in the service of Black Liberation, the U.S. government persecuted, and ultimately forced the disbanding of the group.
The demise of such groups as the CAA, as a result of what political scientist Horace Campbell (1999) calls “low intensity warfare” in the study of Africa and Africans, meant the end of the broad influence of the long U.S. Black tradition of the Pan-Africanist approach to the study of Africa and the diaspora. The purging of these more radical elements of Pan-African political cooperation also went hand in hand with the rise of the moderate sector of U.S. Black politics and intellectual tradition.
The consequences of these events cannot be overstated. The decidedly political Pan-Africanist, transcontinental, tradition of Black studies was doubly marginalized. By the 1950s U.S. mainstream Black intellectuals accepted, to varying degrees, the view that the U.S. nationalist project was, at its core, free and open and could strive towards the moral equality of its citizens. In intellectual practices, the focus shifted from concerns about political economy to interest in isolated notions of “culture.” The example in the study of Africa among many U.S. Black scholars is instructive; in some ways, its approach converged with that of (White) Africanist study of Africa. There were many many silences about the more radical aspects of transnational Black organizing among the new type of Black scholarship framed by the politics of the Cold War. A good example of this new shift was the emergence of a new group, the American Society on African Culture (AMSAC). The AMSAC was launched in 1957 and its founders included James Ivy, editor of the Crisis News paper (for the NAAP), future US supreme court justice, Thurgood Marshall, and the Jazz musician, Duke Ellington. It was later revealed that the AMSAC was organized and funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency – to counter the intellectual and political work of the Council on African Affairs. Nevertheless the intellectual output of the American Society on African Culture would soon replace the popular scholarship on Africa and the diaspora. In its explicitly anticommunist stance, AMsAC’s work demonstrated a shift from concerns with political economy to concerns of “culture.” And as the funding of AMSAC rose with the popularity of the group’s activities, so too came the marginalization of once prominent leaders of the Council on African Affairs, including Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois.
But the inward turn of continental and diaspora Blacks toward domestic concerns has to be understood within global dynamics of race, politics, and economics. Black Studies as we know it today as a discipline is understood to have emerged from struggles for Civil rights in the US and the calls for the racial discrimination and apartheid. If we recall, the early tradition of Black Studies was transcontinental and Pan-Africanist. The institutionalization of Black Studies after the 1960s occurred at the same time as the hegemonic control of the discipline of African Studies, which impeded the (re)incorporation or recovery of its earlier Pan-Afrinist origins.
Meanwhile, in postcolonial Africa, the turn to nation building was also marked by the liberalization of intellectual thought as well as politics – and shaped the “continental tradition” of African Studies. The prominent Pan-Africanist voice of Kwame Nkrumah (and a few others) aside, the end of formal colonialism also allowed the silencing of critiques of neoimperialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. Similar to the ways that conventional views of postcolonial independence equate the transfer of political power from the colonizer with self-determination and national-cultural sovereignty for the previously colonized, emerging African nationalism was articulated in ways that did not allow for direct, local, intellectual analysis of the legacy of white supremacy and continued European neocolonial control of the continent. But it was more than the excitement over “independence,” the control over the political kingdom, and general belief that decolonization was an end in itself, there was no longer a concern with the relationship of independent African states to global white supremacy. Within a decade of decolonization, a western-concocted structural economic decline of newly independent African states, culminating in the rise of neoliberalism with their full economic and political capture by the white west. This has had profound effects on the control of knowledge production on the African continent.
Some refer to the continental tradition of African Studies – that is, the study of African by scholars based on the African continent – as “largely a reaction to the intellectual hegemony of the Africanist enterprise and the hubris and racial arrogance of Africanist scholars.” Unlike those within the (white western-led) Africanist tradition, this first generation of postcolonial African scholars often works without the benefit of state or foundational support; some such scholars are affiliated with a series of regional research institutions outside of the universities, while others are dependent on intermittent and short-term academic positions in Western nations.
The regional research institutions, moreover, are usually funded by Western donor organizations, a fact that often shapes scholarly output and generally limits its capacity for broad impact. African Studies on the African continent, therefore, does not have the power or global authority of its (white-led western) Africanist counterpart. Its research agenda is usually focused on establishing or promoting “indigenous” paradigms and intellectual networks, with specific reference to what are seen as the concrete problems and conditions of the continent (Martin and West 1999). While clearly an important endeavor for self-representation continental African scholars are often constrained by their institutions’ marginalized position within the western-controled economic, political, and therefore educational order. As a result, the continental tradition tends to adopt (or adapt to) a number of conceptual and epistemological paradigms similar to those followed by their Africanist counterparts (see, as a clear example, the hegemonic focus on “development studies” on the African continent). These have also included the treatment of the continent or some of its regions as isolates and, crucially, the maintenance of the Africa-diaspora conceptual split.
I want to be clear here that it is also important to take into account the internal politics of the Black diaspora populations (particularly regarding Black political and intellectual traditions in the Black Diaspora) as members engaged in the ongoing negotiations of identity in the context of global structures that were, and are, inherently anti-Black. Indeed, we must always remember that for Black populations in particular, local meanings are shaped through the interplay of Black people’s active agency with a European-dominated Atlantic political and economic complex.
This is not to say, of course, that the Pan-African tradition of Black Studies – the tradition that sought to understand the international Black experience as constitutively structured by the history and practice of global White supremacy — no longer exists. It certainly does. Yet it remains on the margins of mainstream (that is, institutionalized) Black studies.
At the same time, in Canada, Black Studies has not even entered the state of institutionalization. It is significant, however, that there are Institutes and Centers of African Studies, and even the Canadian Journal of African Studies, that are institutionalized. And we cannot presume these to be Black Studies institutions in the way we have mapped out Black Studies as a Pan-Africanist tradition. In this sense, the split in Black Studies and African Studies remains.
But in the current context of racial retrenchment against the Black communities throughout the world, the ongoing economic and political marginalization of the African continent, and other Black nation-states in the diaspora, I insist that the radical international anti-imperialist vision of early Pan-Africanism must be recovered. Historian Manning Marable once said: “The very use of the term Black Studies is by implication an indictment of American and Western European scholarship. It makes the bold assertion that what we have heretofore called “objective” intellectual activities were actually white studies in perspective and content; and that a corrective bias, a shift, in emphasis is needed…” To expand this I add, a Black Studies project has to take seriously the political economy of imperialism and diaspora, and has to embrace a radical internationalism – as that we find in the work of scholars such as Claudia Jones, Faye V. Harrison, Walter Rodney, Rayford Logan, CLR James, Antenor Firmin, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Amilcar Cabral, Eslanda Robeson – whose shadow we work under but of whose histories and collective contribution to a better world, we often know nothing.
*Sections of this essay are adapted from chapter 7 of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (2013).
Selected References
Campbell, Horace. 1999. “Low-Intensity Warfare and the study of Africans at Home and Abroad.” In Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa, edited by William G. Martin and Michael O. West. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Marable, Manning. (2000). Black studies and the racial mountain. Souls, 2(3), 17–36.
Martin, William G., and Michael O. West, eds. 1999. Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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