African Studies: A Personal Assessment

Extract

For many years, it was traditional for the outgoing President of a scholarly association to give a formal address, usually on some aspect of his own scholarly interests. That tradition seems to have died, and I see no good reason to revive it. The newer tendency is for the outgoing President to talk about the affairs of the Association, but we have the Newsletter and the business meeting for that. It seems a good time to look just a little further afield to the affairs of the Africanist community at large, whether members of this Association or not--to try for historical perspective on the question of where African studies has been and is going. (if I concentrate on African studies in North America, I also recognize that the African Studies Association is not merely a national association. Its membership is and always has been international, but most members still belong to a North American community of Africanists; this is the community I happen to know best, though I apologize for the parochialism.)

It goes without saying that any assessment of African studies must be a series of personal judgments, based obscurely on the prejudices and the experiences of the individual who makes it. The moment may be especially opportune for subjective judgments, since they will soon be corrected by the Social Science Research Council's survey of foreign area programs--a survey directed by Professor Richard Lambert of the University of Pennsylvania.