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In his 1968 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Thomas Bailey stated, “False historical beliefs are so essential to our culture.... How different our national history would be if countless millions of our citizens had not been brought up to believe in the manifestly destined superiority ... of the white race.”¹ However, in this same speech, Bailey warned of the new corrective history recently appearing. Of these African-American historians he asserted, with alarm, that “newly formed hyphenated groups ...

Introduction: What is Africana Studies?

Africana Studies is an academic extension of what Cedric Robinson has called “The Black Radical Tradition.”² This tradition is notable for emerging out of a preexisting constellation of African intellectual work, shaped by millennia of migration, adaptation and improvisation. Through the central acts of translation and recovery,³ Africana Studies seeks to theorize on the basis of long-view genealogies of African intellectual work.

Introduction

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5

Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than vulgar materialism.

-- V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks

This essay is concerned with the epistemic and ideological crises in African American Studies. It is grounded in the possibilities emerging from an intersection of Du Boisian historical phenomenology and dialectical logic.¹ As such it is an attempt to extend Du Boisian thought and the boundaries of African American Studies as a social science. This essay is a rereading of Du Bois; it locates his project within social theory, epistemology and logic. It seeks to expand conventional discourses on Du Bois in order to reground them as a contribution to African American Studies.

“In spite of all that has been done to us, we who have been described so often, are now describing.” – James Baldwin¹

The publication of a paperback edition of Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin,² by author and journalist Herb Boyd, whose recent credits include The Harlem Reader,³ brings a fresh interpretation of Baldwin’s life and work to the attention of Baldwin loyalists as well as to potentially larger audiences.

Throughout the twentieth century, most progressive scholars have argued against the utility of a Marxist perspective in analyzing racial oppression in the United States. These scholars and critics reject the Marxist notions that racial oppression is undergirded by exploitative and oppressive economic arrangements, that the dominant class plays a major role in the construction of racial oppression, and that racial conflict in the United States is masked class conflict.

Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Gerald Horne, Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

Introduction