1.1: Context and Foundations

Black Studies: Interdisciplinary Political Project for Liberation

On April 3, 2017, one day before the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination forty-nine years prior, a public roundtable on the state of Black Studies was held at the University of Toronto. The panel was moderated by Canadian-based Black Studies scholars Afua Cooper and Rinaldo Walcott. The illustrious guests were poet and Performance Studies scholar Fred Moten and distinguished historian Robin D. G. Kelley, both interdisciplinary scholars. Moten noted that Black Studies was the "atmosphere in which [he] grew up,” elaborating by saying he "loved how that atmosphere felt, smelled, and sounded."^[1] He also expressed love for “the movements” that gave birth to Black Studies; for Moten, Black Studies is a political project rooted in Black life and not only a discipline residing in colleges and universities. Moten fondly recalled the household and community he grew up in, where food, music, language, and family bonds were foundational to his love and commitment to Black people and liberation. While this atmosphere and community exists, it is critical to understand that the project of Black studies also resides in the organizations and institutions that protected, fortified, and sustained African-American communities.

Rinaldo Walcott asked the panel to think aloud about the relationship between Black Studies and Black politics within the context of the Black Lives Matter insurgency sweeping the nation in response to state-sanctioned police violence. Kelley asserted that he tended to think of Black studies not so much as an academic discipline or confluence of disciplines but as the project and a movement for Black liberation.

Moten acknowledged that although Black Studies typically referred to the academic enterprise of studying people of African descent through a range of scholarly disciplines in colleges and universities, it was far more than that. He quipped that Black Studies began outside of the university and its arrival to the academy had been “good and bad.”^[2] For Moten, Black Studies had done more to enrich the university than the university had done to sustain it. Cautiously reflective, Moten noted that he was “not trying to suggest some withdrawal of Black Studies from the university but believed that Black Studies practitioners had earned the right to reconsider and return to the intellectual and political mission of the field, which endeavored to grapple with matters as significant as restoring and preserving the earth itself.”^[3]

In concurrence with Moten, renowned historian Robin D.G. Kelley noted that Black Studies emerged from social movements and was a “political project for liberation.” In 2016, Kelley wrote “Black Study, Black Struggle” as part of a series of articles that explored the nature of Black Studies in light of the Black Lives Matter insurgency that grew from a hashtag following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Young people of color, many of whom attended colleges and universities, began to turn to Black Studies and Ethnic Studies programs for political insight, resources, and solidarity but often found academic spaces to be politically indifferent, culturally alienating, and fundamentally unsafe. Although Black Lives Matter inspired a resurgence of campus activism, many began to demand that universities become more hospitable to students of color. In addition, Kelley noted that students were “dealing with a kind of deracinated curriculum where ethnic studies in some places wasn’t what it was in its inception.”^[4] Without question, student demands were valid and essential; Kelley, however, was mainly concerned with “the contradictory impulses within the movement: the tension between reform and revolution, between desiring to belong and rejecting the university as a cog in the neoliberal order.”^[5] What did it mean “for Black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them—of loving anyone, perhaps—and to manifest this yearning by framing their lives largely through trauma.”^[6] Although Kelley was careful not to dismiss trauma and mental health as essential areas in need of attention, he encouraged students to “become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security.”^[7]

Kelley’s pronouncements were aimed at the self-identified student radicals who were genuine in their efforts to foment change and transformation on campuses and in the streets. He challenged student activists not to “cleave their activism from their intellectual lives or mistakenly believe that because the university does not offer them the education that they crave, that its beyond their reach.”^[8] Students needed to recognize that there was a “long history of Black activists repurposing university resources to instruct themselves and one another—to self-radicalize, in effect.”^[9] It was not necessary that students seek to imitate the past, but see past initiatives as “historical models that may provide valuable insights for those seeking novel solutions.”^[10] Fred Moten and Robin Kelley’s exchange cuts to the heart of this chapter, which seeks to define what Black Studies is and provide historical context for its creation, evolution, and maturation over time. Moreover, this chapter seeks to provide a brief historical overview of a vast and exciting field of activism, study, and scholarship that has animated the field.

In Chapter 3–Fugitive Knowledge: Africana Studies Liberatory Pedagogy, Dr. Amiri Mahnzili provides a more detailed analysis of fugitive knowledge production and dissemination outside the academy.

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Endnotes

^[1] Kelley, Robin and Moten, Fred, “Robin Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation,” The Master of Visual Studies, University of Toronto. June 15, 2017. Proseminar series

^[2] Ibid

^[3] Ibid

^[4] Kelley, Robin, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 40, no 2 (2016), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cj8q196

^[5] Ibid

^[6] Ibid

^[7] Ibid

^[8] Ibid

^[9] Ibid

^[10] Ibid