• Corpus ID: 140735927

Africology, Black studies, African American studies, Africana studies, or African world studies? What’s so important about a given name?

@article{Okafor2014AfricologyBS,
  title={Africology, Black studies, African American studies, Africana studies, or African world studies? What’s so important about a given name?},
  author={Victor Oguejiofor Okafor},
  journal={The Journal of Pan-African Studies},
  year={2014},
  volume={6},
  pages={209}
}

• V. Okafor
• Published 1 February 2014
• History
• The Journal of Pan-African Studies

Methodology As a methodology, this paper is based on a critical discussion and synthesis of materials drawn from both secondary and primary research sources. Using materials from both sources, the paper discusses and evaluates documented approaches to the naming of institutional and intellectual studies of peoples and cultures of the African world. "Secondary sources" include existing journal, online and book publications, whereas, "primary sources," in the context of this paper, refer to information and data collected by this author, such as information and data related to the author's own experience of steering a recent change in the name of the academic department over which he presides. Introduction The debate about what should be the appropriate name for our project--that is, our systematic inquiry into the life and cultures of peoples of the African world--goes back to the time period of the black power movement--a movement that I prefer to describe as a black empowerment movement. The black empowerment movement evolved from the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. Whereas the central thrust of the antecedent civil rights movement was to persuade and compel the powers-that-be in the United States to put an end to the Jim Crow social system and practice of racial segregation and its discriminatory concomitants and usher in an era of desegregation and equal treatment under the law, the next phase, known as the black power movement, was one that was specifically geared towards empowering people of African descent in the socioeconomic and political arenas. It was the black power movement that sought equal voting rights, economic equity, and a new educational order. As a concept, the black power movement represented African diasporic aspirations for black control of black political matters, black control of its economic life, and black control of its cultural life. Against the backdrop of cultural hegemony, the concept of black power movement represented aspirations for black self-definition, self-respect and cultural pluralism--as opposed to a rigid melting pot vision of America. Cultural pluralism, which can also be described as multiculturalism, advocates for a social order in which the constituent communities of the nation are allowed to co-exist on their own cultural terms, not on the exclusive terms of the majority culture although cultural diffusion appears inescapable in a multicultural milieu. On the university campuses, the visions of the black power movement were manifested most prominently through the activism of the black students' movement. One of the first acts of self-definition that occurred on campus was that the Negro Student Union renamed itself as the black student union, a gesture whose significance lies in how it symbolically reflected a liberated sense of self on the part of the emerging youth of the African diaspora. In the wake of demands for equal treatment under the law and grassroots pressures from the unfolding civil rights protests, in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its famous Brown decision which declared school segregation as unconstitutional. Although the body politic in general was rather reluctant and slow in implementing the ruling of the Supreme Court--you will recall that busing, which in and of itself was controversial, was deployed to integrate reluctant school systems across the nation--the Brown judgment ultimately led to the opening of doors of previously all-white institutions to people of color--students, faculty and staff. As the newly-arrived students enrolled and experienced existing courses for their degrees, they began to sense an emptiness, a void in those courses on matters related to African diasporic life and cultures. That is to say that it was the perception of these students of color that the traditional disciplines, by and large, did not mirror their understanding of the realities of the communities that they came from. …