Thoughts on Intellectual and Institutional Links Between African and Black Studies

Black identity and nationalism in the civil rights era were forged through trans-Atlantic and Pan-African solidarity. Both African and African-American intel-lectuals and institutions played key roles in Pan-African nationalism and the sustenance of civil rights struggles across the Atlantic. However, in the 1970s onwards, these Pan-African links were subverted by vertical dialogues between western, especially white, ‘experts ’ of Africa and Africans; a dialogue that was skewed in favour of Africanist paradigms and knowledge because of the obvi-ous unequal distribution of intellectual resources in favour of white researchers in the global North. This shift was also matched by the preponderance of nega-tive themes about Africa, an increasing amount of ignorance in the west of the realities in Africa and the treatment of Africa as a mere object of curiosity and theory testing. This paper locates the growing ‘ignorance ’ of African realities among African-Americans in the rise and dominance of Africanist Africa, its disengagement from Black Studies, the marginalisation of African-American and African scholarship (conducted by black scholars) in Euro-American scholar-ship and the de-emphasis of radical and Black intellectual traditions in the main-stream study of Africans. The paper proposes the enhancement of direct hori-zontal dialogue between Africans and African-Americans instead of the vertical dialogue between Africans and Africanists which has failed to provide an objec-tive presentation of Africa’s achievements and failures, gains and losses. Résumé L’identité noire et le nationalisme dans la période des droits civils ont été forgés à travers la solidarité transatlantique et panafricaine. Les intellectuels et les institutions africaines et afro-américains ont joué un rôle clé dans le nationalisme panafricain et dans le renforcement des luttes pour les droits civils à traver