Disciplinary Formations Across Black and African Studies

What sustains the disciplinary boundaries between Black Studies and African Studies? Who is hailed by categories like Black and African? This paper queries how neither term possesses a stable referent. Each emerges through shifting intellectual and political projects whose points of convergence and divergence reveal the instability of both categories. At times, the intellectual projects of Black Studies and African Studies might overlap, as seen in studies of internationalist formations against Euro-American empire. At other moments, they become sites of political divergence, from the geopolitical knowledge-gathering imperatives of area studies’ “Cold War” inheritance, through to contemporary engagements (including both uses and abuses) of an “undercommons.” This paper will explore the murkiness of these categories and how each disturbs the seeming coherence of the other.