Question

define africana studies and discuss their evolution.

Answer 1

• Black Studies, or Africana Studies more broadly, is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to studying and understanding the experiences of African people and African-descended people across the Diaspora.
• It grew most directly out of campus demands made by black students, and their allies and supporters, during the mass protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• From the outset, the goal of Africana Studies was to transform higher education, chiefly by addressing the lack of faculty and staff diversity; altering traditional curricula limited by Eurocentric paradigms; centering the study of people of African descent in the university canon; linking academic teachings and scholarship with social and civic engagement; and raising critical questions about the purpose of scholarly knowledge production, the nature of truth claims, and the overall mission of higher education.
• Africana Studies was “the first in a series of academic fields that would challenge social hierarchies and diversify the academy.
• Africana Studies also became a laboratory for multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary approaches combining humanities and social science literatures and methods, which most U.S. colleges and universities now actively promote as being key to higher education in the twenty-first century.
• The changing focal points of Africana Studies have also reflected important demographic transformations among the black population in the United States, most especially the post-1970s rise of mass incarceration, as well as the growth of immigrants from Continental Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.