Last month, the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell celebrated its 30th anniversary year by hosting the 31st annual conference of the African Heritage Studies Association. The event was well attended and drew scholars from across the country. Here is a report about the conference, which took place Oct. 14-17 in Ithaca.
The African Heritage Studies Association was founded in 1968 by John Henrik Clarke, an African-American historian and educator. The association's annual conference has long provided a venue for scholars in the field of Africana studies, and beyond, to share their work, engage in discipline curriculum critique, as well as provide a community of support for educators who study and research the experiences of African-American and global African peoples.
This year's conference, in Ithaca, titled "Reflections on Three Decades of Africana Studies Protestation, Conception, and Illumination," featured panels and plenary sessions that addressed political conflict and human rights, community empowerment, the impact of new technologies, Pan-Africanism and the arts and humanities within Africana studies.
Gender within Africana studies was a featured topic at the conference, and in his welcome statement, Cornell Africana Studies and Research Center Director James Turner focused on the need for the discipline to rigorously engage gender and black women's histories. He spoke of the need for a paradigmatic shift within the discipline, arguing that the "reconstruction of the canon of Black Studies is an intellectual and academic imperative for the future of the field." Turner added: "Most respectable scholars realize that a meaningfully accurate study of history must be centrally inclusive of gender. An African-American gender perspective provides a fuller, more complex view of black life."
The conference began Oct. 14 with a "Tribute to the Elders" held at the St. James A.M.E. Zion Church in downtown Ithaca. An important African tradition, the celebration offered reverence to African-American elders in Ithaca for their work and dedication in developing and sustaining the African community.
Conference sessions began officially Oct. 15 at the Clarion Hotel. Clarence J. Munford, a professor of history at the University of Guelph, presented a paper titled "Multi-cultural Education" during the "Africana Studies at Crossroads" panel. Skeptical of the value of multicultural education, he argued that "the very premise of multicultural education denies the centrality of the 'Black Agenda,' denies the racial dichotomy in the history of America." African-Americans must rethink the risks of multicultural education, he argued, dismissing it as a "shopping list approach to liberation." In the 1960s and 1970s, he said, African-Americans became "loose and liberal in their definitions of oppression." Africana studies, he finished, must remain autonomous. "We should not couch our curriculum demands within the larger academy; we must stop trying to sneak in the back door," he said.
The panel included presentations from two Cornell postgraduates: Angel D. Nieves, a doctoral candidate in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, and Leslie Alexander, Ph.D. '99 in history and now an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Longtime student activists, Nieves and Alexander presented a paper titled "The Sankofa Plan: The Past, Present, and Our Vision for the Future of Africana Studies at Cornell University." In it Nieves and Alexander argued that a plan to improve the Africana Studies and Research Center demands that the "provost allocate additional faculty lines to Africana." They called for the "campuswide hiring of more professors of African descent" who teach Africana studies, as well as within other fields, and they challenged Africana to consider joint positions between Africana and the Latino Studies Program. They also stressed the need for a Ph.D. program within Africana studies, adding that emerging young scholars are unfairly forced into mainstream, white disciplines.
The second session of the conference took place at the Robert Purcell Conference Center and included a plenary session titled "(En) Gendering Africana Studies." Tiffany Patterson, professor of history and Africana studies at Binghamton University, led a call to those in the field of Africana studies to work at dismantling the cloud of romanticism that hovers over the oft-sexist "black power" struggles of the 1960s, as well as to confront the divisive homophobia that often dwells within Africana studies and the larger African-American community.
The conference concluded Oct. 17 with a gathering at the Africana Studies and Research Center that offered students, professors and conference participants the opportunity to express their views about the weekend. The gathering concluded with an invocation to the ancestors and call of praise to the elders.
Reflecting on the weekend, Nieves said the conference provided faculty, staff and students "who were here last year with an equally important opportunity to see how very central Cornell's program in Africana studies is to our collective efforts in providing our own people of color with the many tools necessary for political, social and economic self-determination."
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