In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.

Once the geographic, political, and academic severance of the two Africas was completed, it did not take long before the carcass of a disembodied (sub-Saharan) Africa studies was sutured on to African American studies. Thus, the search for the “African” in African Americans took off in earnest in the 1960s.

This project had an academic lineage dating back to the turn of the 20th century, when W. E. B. DuBois took up the idea of creating Encyclopedia Africana, which, he hoped, would demonstrate the contributions of blacks to the world. Without financial or political support, however, his idea never saw the light of day. The fruition of this academic project had to wait for another half century, until the creation of the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University in the late 1960s.

The civil rights and student rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s forced academic institutions to establish programs and departments to highlight the contributions, experiences, and history of Africans and African Americans. Cornell's groundbreaking decision, followed by many other colleges and universities in the United States, created new academic and institutional challenges. Should African studies and African American studies be housed in one department/program or be separated? What should this discipline be named—Africana studies, African and African American studies, or black studies? What exactly should be its subject? Should it include the history, culture, and experiences of only blacks in the United States and Africans on the continent, or should the discipline also include Afro-Caribbeans? A number of these departments and programs, given certain geographic and demographic realities, added the study of Latino and Puerto Rican peoples. At Hunter College, our Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino studies department acknowledges this triple heritage.

However questionable and difficult the task of joining Africa and African America into a coherent and rational intellectual, political, academic, and cultural project, it offered students and scholars the opportunity to study African and African American experiences in new ways. However, no matter what names these programs and departments carry, many are no more than the sum of their parts. The curriculum offered reflects the pool of faculty interests and concerns. Perusing the catalogues of U.S. universities, one finds a pastiche of courses offered by African/African American studies, all with a mission “devoted to the critical and systematic examination of the cultural, political, social, and historical experiences of peoples of the African Diaspora.”Footnote ¹ But whose experiences? Whose histories? Whose cultures? Due to funding constraints, especially in smaller departments, these programs offer no more than a narrow slice of histories, cultures, and experiences. They end up essentializing Africa and African America.

Perhaps in response to criticism, in the 1980s and 1990s the field metamorphosed once again. The definition of “African” expanded with calls to incorporate even more of the diaspora into African/African American studies. In 1996, Issue: A Journal of Opinion devoted an entire issue to the theme of African (diaspora) studies. In 2000 the African Studies Review published a special issue on the African diaspora. The African Studies Association regularly includes panels on the African diaspora at its annual conference. No longer is the African experience confined to Africans, African Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans (whether English, French, or Spanish speaking), which essentially had reduced the diaspora to enslaved and colonized peoples. Today the proliferation of African diaspora studies has led to an expansive field of scholarly research and academic courses. The (African) diaspora has truly gone global. Now, no African/African American studies department can call itself legitimate if it does not offer courses on Lusophone “Africans” and Hispanics in Central and South America. Still, the notion of the African diaspora, focused primarily on the Western Hemisphere, has been slow to include “Africans” found elsewhere—Europe, the Indian and Arabian subcontinents, and the rest of Asia.

Even as African diaspora studies expands to cover the entire globe, many scholars remain concerned about where this intellectual pursuit ends. This vast project continues the tendency to exaggerate sameness out of profound and different historical and cultural experiences. Geography no longer matters. What is different and unique about peoples living in different areas of the world becomes irrelevant compared to the experiences of oppression, survival, and resistance lived by “Africans.”

The state of the field divides scholars who no longer agree on what exactly constitutes African studies. Bowman and Cohen's 2002 study of U.S. faculty teaching in African studies programs demonstrates different opinions on what they understand to be the content and subject of the field: 41 percent of faculty surveyed believe that it is the study of people in Africa and the African diaspora, 33 percent include the entire continent of Africa, and 22 percent opine that the field refers only to sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ²

The study of the entire African continent unencumbered by the diaspora remains an important, worthy, and necessary intellectual enterprise. Hitched to diaspora studies, Africa remains marginalized; unhitched from North Africa, it is poorly studied. If anything, sub-Saharan Africans share with North Africans not just a geographical space but also a longer history and, perhaps, more similar experiences than those shared with Africans of the diaspora.

If African studies is to have any future, we must begin, as Mervat Hatem suggests, by restoring North Africa to that field of study. The return to geography and the uniting of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in the disciplines must be encouraged and supported. Then, and only then, will the continent of Africa have a self-defined and self-directed future.