African American Studies

Five minutes on the World Wide Web makes the point more plainly than a full weekend with a stack of college catalogs: There are as many types of African American Studies programs as there are institutions of higher learning offering them.
Some programs — like those at California State University-Long Beach and Cornell University — follow Temple University's Afrocentric model. Others, like University of California-Los Angeles and University of California-Berkeley, are organized as "diaspora" studies programs with course offerings on the Caribbean and Africa as well as on African Americans. On the East Coast, at schools like the University of Virginia, "the Black Atlantic" is the buzzword, while at places like Yale, a postmodern transnationalism informed by cultural studies is the rage. Programs like Harvard University's tilt heavily toward the American aspect of African American. While at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the goal is to turn out Ph.D.s who look like that school's famous alum, W.E.B. Du Bois.
The range of courses and program configurations is dizzying and exciting. But it is also confusing. The layman is left with the question: Is African American Studies a discipline with or without a methodology?

Afrocentricity
The answer to that question depends very much on whom one asks. Ask Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, whose Ph.D. program at Temple — the nation's first — is celebrating its 12th anniversary this year, and the answer is: Without.
"In the ‘60s, we said we wanted an approach that would show the efficacy of the African way," says Asante.
 The way Asante forged was Afrocentrism, which he defines as an "authentic" way of "accessing, locating, interpreting and understanding African peoples based on the centeredness and agency of those people."
Rather than advocating any one method of study, Dr. Percy Hintzen, professor and chair of African American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, advocates a kind of theoretical, methodological and analytical pluralism.
For Hintzen, Afrocentricity is important only "when we're talking about the ways in which people who identify themselves as being of African descent negotiate their reality," Hintzen says.
Berkeley's focus is on what Hintzen calls "diasporic identities"  —  the ways in which Black people understand their "Blackness" from various locations in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.
As a historian, Columbia University's Dr. Daryl Scott admits he has a bias toward empirical research, and it concerns him that "the movement toward a transnational history of people of African descent is being spearheaded by the least empirical people — (scholars in literature and aesthetics) who don't have the burden of doing fieldwork."
Scott is an agnostic on Afrocentrism — "unlike a lot of people, I don't find the paradigm inherently bankrupt," he says — and he finds merit in the work of "diaspora" scholars as well. But he thinks both approaches may share a common problem.
"The question for those who want to talk about the ‘Black World' in a transnational, non-Afrocentric way is, ‘Will they be able to create a body of knowledge that will justify their ambition?' " Scott says.
Only time will tell.