NEW YORK
In the 1960s, college administrations cobled together
piece-meal Black studies programs to placate African American students,
inspired by Black Power and African independence struggles, demanding
curriculums and professors “relevant” to their experiences.
In the ’90s, Black studies is the discipline du jour, thanks in
large part to the recognition, respect, and even celebrity that Harvard
University’s Dream Team of Black scholars, led by Dr. Henry Louis Gates
Jr., is bringing to the field. And as the new millennium draws near,
other institutions are following suit, courting the prestige of
contemporary Black thought.
Last month, at “New Voices in Black Studies” — an event described
by program director Dr. Manthia Diawara as a “something of a coming-out
party for NYU Africana Studies” — the work of seven New York
University scholars took center stage on this Greenwich Village campus.
The gathering drew an audience of some 250 students, scholars, and
Village residents, most of whom were African American.
“I felt it was genuinely a celebration of Black authors in Africana
Studies, an area where there is such an explosion of new scholarship,
new writing,” said NYU historian Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, who
participated in the event.
Jocularly dismissing the Ivy League establishments as “minor
competitors” in comparison, Dr. Catharine Stimpson, dean of NYU’s
Graduate School of Arts and Science, praised the work of her
colleagues, saying, “They take the world as their subject and learning
as their specialty.”
The scholarship putting NYU “on the map” explores the contributions
that Black people in Africa and throughout the diaspora have made to
the modern world. NYU historian Dr. Tricia Rose, who co-moderated the
evening with Stimpson, noted that what unites this expansive work “is
the power and necessity of narrative, the stories we tell ourselves,
the stories told about us.”
A major theme coursing through the event was the ways contemporary
Black thought reinterprets and refashions “mythic” European narratives.
