Area Studies and the Challenges of Creating a Space for Public Debate

Abstract

Scholarship in the African humanities—art history, cultural anthropology, history, literature, religion, and so forth—has transcended disciplinary ways of knowing, transformed scholarly conversations from a focus on difference between Africa and the West to an emphasis on connections and convergence, and emphasized the universality of the particular. Today, the African humanities must confront another limitation in scholarly discourse about Africa: the presentist priorities of schools of global studies. If it appears that claims to particularistic knowledge of social and historical processes and linguistic competence are falling on deaf ears, it may be because the logic of securing “America’s Place in the World,” the topic of the spring 2016 symposium in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, no longer depends on knowledge of cultural processes produced by academics based in the university system. The United States moved on in the fall of 2014 from cultural tactics such as the Human Terrain Systems (HTS), developed by the US Army in 2006, to technical interventions like drones—interventions that do not rely on human sentiment or error, and big data like computational social sciences and predictive modeling (Gezari 2015). HTS embedded anthropologists (though the major scholarly association, the American Anthropological Association, rightly opposed HTS) and other social scientists with military units to provide regional expertise and cultural knowledge to aid military intelligence gathering and policymaking. In this new climate, dominated by technological solutions to social and political problems, largely managed by the Department of Defense, how can scholars of the African humanities based in the university system continue to make a case for the knowledge that we produce, which prioritizes humanistic understanding and humane values? It is these values, I argue, that foster public debate on the central issues of our time.