 *Why
I Am (Not) an Africanist: A Reflection* [1]
(Paper presented at the Fifth Annual Penn African
Studies Workshop, October 17, 1997)
by Shawkat M Toorawa (University of Mauritius)
[Copyright 1998, Shawkat M Toorawa, All Rights Reserved.
This work may be cited, for non-profit educational use only, by crediting
the author and the exact URL of this document.]
I. Oriental Studies
II. Asian and African Languages and
Literature
III. Humanities
Conclusion
*NOTES*
This reflection is divided into three parts: I. `Oriental Studies,'
II. `Asian and African Languages and Literature,' and III. `Humanities.'
These rubrics are the names of administrative and academic units to which
I have been attached. I ask indulgence in allowing me to frame a discussion
of those issues I think relevant to the question of area studies around
my own academic history. I should point out that a number of my formulations
here are indebted to an earlier reflection, `Mapping Communities and their
Cultural Territories.' [2]
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
I.
Oriental Studies
I am not considered, in prevailing area-study or funding configurations,
an Africanist. I was trained (primarily) in Arabic and Islamic Studies
in a University of Pennsylvania department known for a century as `Oriental
Studies,' [3] in which one could specialize in Ancient Chinese History,
Modern Israeli Folklore, Middle Kingdom Egyptian Archeology, Medieval Arabic
Literature, Sanskrit Philology, Persian Romance, Japanese Art, Turkish
Music, Midrash... and so on. This department recently -- on July 1st, 1992
-- changed its name to `Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.' The component
`Asian' is meant to evoke China, Japan, and Korea without the attendant
racism considered implicit in the historically respectable, yet un-worthy
adjective `Oriental.' A number of distinguished institutions worldwide
have resisted this change. North America's own American Oriental Society
maintains, and sustains, four traditional divisions: (1) Traditional India
and South Asia, to which Inner Asia has been added, (2) East Asia, (3)
the Ancient Near East, and (4) Islam -- this last the only non-geographical
division. But other institutions have embraced the change. The `International
Congress of Orientalists' has opted for `International Congress of Asian
and North African Studies.' (At its most recent meeting, in Budapest this
year, the plenary focus was on `Orientalist scholarship.')
To return to the Penn department, the component `Middle Eastern' in
the new name `Asian and Middle Eastern Studies' was a compromise meant
to cover everything Judaic, Islamic and, I suppose, Iranian, though perhaps
Persia was assigned to the `Asian' component in the name. The latter evidently
also includes Ancient India, curiously, but traditionally, still in the
domain of the former `Oriental Studies,' and not reassigned to `South Asia
Regional Studies,' one of the midnight children with which it shares space
and dually-appointed faculty. The component `Middle Eastern' also served
to exorcize Edward Said's `Oriental' demon, [4] though, it must be said,
that the initiative to change the department's name was a very mediatized
undergraduate Asian-American one. [5] Indeed, the University now has a
program in `Asian American Studies,' headed, uncannily, by a Sanskritist
appointed in both `South Asia Regional Studies' and `Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies.'
Though the decision to change the name to `Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies' was made by administrative fiat (in response to pressure), the
actual name change was left to the department. Not unlike the decision
of Marvel Comics to determine by ballot whether `Batman and Robin' readers
wanted Robin killed off or retained, the department contacted its own,
and solicited suggestions -- which would be put to a vote -- about which
disciplinary siblings, wards, and sidekicks would get the boot, and which
the letterhead. My tongue-in-confused-cheek `Non-White Studies' apparently
never made the short-list though suggestions such as `Non-American, Non-Greco-Roman
Studies' and `Anonymous Studies' were published and circulated. [6]
The decision to settle on `Asian and Middle Eastern' was a curious
one. Why `and Middle Eastern' when that did not evoke Judaic Studies, or
the Ancient Near East, names still given to those divisions within the
department, divisions that account between them for half the faculty and
students? Why not follow the lead of other North American universities
by opting for, and voting for, say, the disclipinarily and geographically
more encompassing `Near Eastern'? Neither is altogether accurate, but not-altogether-accuracy
seems to be de rigueur in naming areas for study. `Asian,' for instance,
here does not include, or pretend to, South Asia, South-East Asia, or North
Asia... If Asia -- named incidentally by the Turks for Pharaoh's wife Asiya,
who raised Moses as her own -- is in fact Asia for at least some of its
inhabitants, the Middle East, on the other hand, is only the middle of
another's imagined Orient. Maybe there is a clue about the choice of the
name `Asian and Middle Eastern Studies' in the fact that the Judaic division
has the Center for Jewish Studies, a Penn-affiliated, independently funded
institution that focuses on Judaica and Hebraica, that has Aleph, its own
discrete library cataloging system unhooked, technology notwithstanding,
to Penn's larger Franklin library catalog system. And maybe there is a
clue in the fact that the Ancient Near East's archeologists have the University
Museum, another Penn-affiliated institution that also has its own library
-- mercifully linked to Franklin -- and its own funding sources.
I might add as an aside that since the 1992 decision, a number
of significant funding-linked developments have taken place. This year
alone the fledgling Center for East Asian Studies (1994) received two and
a half million dollars in matching funds for Korean Studies, and the Middle
East Center -- which over the decades, went from occupying an entire building
at 38th and Walnut Streets to a two hundred square foot office -- now hangs
on for dear life as it was denied Title VI funding.
Maybe ultimately then the name-change did not boil down to a matter
of identity or integrity, tradition or turf, but simply to dollars and
not so common cents, priorities and purse-strings. The name mattered most
to the East Asia and Middle East specialists, who, unlike the archeologists
and Judaica/Hebraica scholars, foresaw -- even if they did not in the end
get -- institutional capital by appropriating the name. But it strikes
me that they missed the point that their regional identities, Middle Eastern
and East Asian, were anomalies in a decade that was moving away from climes
and toward something grander, even if that new catchment did not (yet)
have a name. [7]
But naming, here, does not seem to me to be as much about social
and political mandates, in the way it evidently has been in the case of
African/American studies: I think of a number of the essays in James Conyers'
recent volume. [8] But we cannot get away from the fact that, in Basil
Davidson's trenchant words, `The frontiers are there, the frontiers are
sacred. What else, after all, could guarantee privilege and power to the
ruling elites?' [9] In area studies, these ruling elites were probably,
to a greater extent than Goran Hyden gives credit, `conservative Cold War
strategists.' `Liberals with a commitment to reforming higher education
curricula' were, to be sure, also involved in the re-configurations, but
they were not alone. [10] Others lurked purveying essences -- the Celtic
spirit, the Asiatic mode, negritude, creolite, Islam, Slavic origins --
in an effort, in crude terms, to divide and rule. [11] It is old news that
the American academy is a "direct, shaped product of founding ideologies,"
but we must remain acutely aware that such ideologies bring heavy liabilities
and can, as history has mercilessly shown, also bring heavy casualties.
[12]
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
II.
Asian and African Languages and Literature
From 1989 to 1991, the PC years, I taught in `Asian and African Languages
and Literature,' a `section' at Duke University. It was not quite a department,
the University not seeing fit to fund what in its view essentially amounted
to a motley cluster of language specialists in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew,
Hindi, Korean, and Japanese. The absurdity of the name `Asian and African
Languages and Literature' was lost on no-one, least of all on those of
us who constituted it. But Duke had innovated a number of unique programs
that subverted the dominant funding paradigms and we were all pleased about
that. Indeed, when I proposed a core-course for the minor entitled `Introduction
to Asian and African Literatures,' we were able to cross-list it as a course
in the University's Program in Literature, a division that eschewed language-
and language group-based scholarship in literary studies. Although Anthony
Appiah, Skip Gates and Valentin Mudimbe held traditional appointments,
Philosophy, English and Romance Languages respectively, it was from the
Program in Literature that many of their students came. Some of these students
did comparative work in literature but not all. The Program in Literature
was certainly not a misnomer for `Comparative Literature.'
Comparative studies did exist at Duke, also in a unique way. A department
bearing the name `Comparative Area Studies' prepared students for area
studies in general. It attracted Dan Johns's Africanists, John Richards'
India specialists, and all of our department-less, and thus major-less,
`Asian and African Languages and Literature' students, from those interested
in medieval Hispano-Arabic poetry, to Arab-Israeli politics, to Indian
health care, to the Taiwanese economy, to pre-modern Japanese art. But
I suppose that ultimately we were not able to get away from the ghettoizing,
even by our own students, some of whom took courses in `Asian and African
Literature' merely to satisfy an impulse to give Asia and Africa a momentary
ear.
The media had its own take. Just before the military onslaught of Iraq
I got a phone call from a Durham daily asking whether I would be willing
to comment on the `historical background' to the imminent War and to Iraq's
territorial claims on Kuwait. I was surprised. Why me, I asked? Because
I taught Arabic, came the answer. I paused and then asked whether Annabelle
Patterson and Stanley Fish, scholars of early English literature, had been
called when Britain reclaimed the Malvinas as their Falklands? The reporter
went quiet.
As it turns out, I was qualified to answer the question. But I wanted
to make a point and kept my silence, suggesting they contact any number
of political scientists on the faculty. I resented the reasoning that led
the reporter to call me, but I realized that my training did make of me
something of a `Middle East' specialist. Little did I know then that my
department at Penn would shortly thereafter enshrine that aspect of my
training in its new name.
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
III.
Humanities
Back to my season of migration. In 1993 I found myself in Mauritius. In
1994 I applied for a History position in the Department of Humanities at
the University of Mauritius. I later heard that I had not been seriously
considered because my degrees were not in `History' but in `Oriental Studies.'
In 1995 I reapplied for the same position, this time including a statement
explaining that I was nothing if not a historian. Three months later I
was teaching a course in Historical Methodology, another in the Medieval
History of the Near East, and a course, in French, on French Medieval Literary
History. I had been hired by an "African" University to teach French literature.
And all the while I was given (not so) subtle signals about becoming an
Indian Ocean specialist.
The paradox of which I am an example is a curious spin on the
paradox of wanting to downgrade area studies while expecting in-depth knowledge
of specific regions. My personal paradox is that I have been reconfigured
and am, in the final analysis -- or at any rate the current analysis --
a species of Africanist: I was trained in a language spoken in all of North
Africa, which led me to spend a fellowship year in Egypt; I have taught
Sudanese, Zimbabwean and South African literature; I teach courses in North
African history; my research focuses on the medieval maritime history of
East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean; and, as someone who lives and
works in Africa, I have a moral and intellectual commitment to it.
*
Edward Said has observed that "No-one today is purely one thing."
[13] Indeed, the concept of area studies as islands of cartographically
meaningful units must also be revisited. They too are no longer purely
one thing. In fact, if we think, or continue to think, of area studies
as islands, we -- that is we the conservative Cold War strategists, the
liberals with a commitment to reforming higher education curricula, the
special interest groups -- we risk forgetting that the boundaries we ascribed
area studies were ascribed and are not pre-existing, dare I say divinely
sanctioned, ones. Just as "the concept of nationhood which relies upon
the cultural idea of the island" is no longer tenable, [14] so too is the
concept of an area studies which relies on predetermined boundaries tenable
only with the greatest of difficulty.
Cultures, communities, and group experiences are not pure, essential,
but "oddly hybrid... partak[ing] of many often contradictory experiences
and domains, cross[ing] national boundaries, defy[ing] the police action
of simple dogma..." [15] There may be a tendency to see culture and group
experience as enclosed and enclosable, but just as cultures are not impermeable,
neither are area studies, and just as the boundaries of culture are fluid,
at best, so too are those of area studies. Goran Hyden writes that no one
school or theory is singularly relevant:
"An effort to portray Africa as just one of many regions in the
world with little identitiy of its own is no better than suggesting that
only Africa's peculiarity is what matters. African studies cannot flourish
without recognition of intellectual pluralism and mutual respect of contending
perspectives."
The experiences of cultures are also fraught with what James Snead
has called contagion. [16] Snead specifically criticizes Africanists who
compress variety into identity. He believes that this kind of compression
turns critics and observers into racists or nationalists. Racists purvey
unproblematized compressed identities such as `africanite' where a black,
African writer's work is obligatorily "an expression of `negritude,' a
verbal manifestation of a particular soul;" and Nationalists are preoccupied
with "mapping the geography of... a literature conveniently contained within...
arbitrary territorial boundaries..." [17] Snead draws on the cartographic
metaphor and calls these and other projections "flattened perspectives."
Cartographies are not useful when we come to the realization that
area studies, like the areas they purport to re/present, are possessed
of transgressive boundaries; are irredeemably plural, postmodern; and are
a space that must be shared, that necessitate overlap and affinity. It
is important therefore to determine what the preconditions are under which
the formulations of identity and difference do not risk becoming static
categories used to polarize and fragment the intellectual community. [18]
And important also to determine, in view of the fact that a system of thought
that represents the `other' as a variation of the `same' cannot do justice,
what concept of difference can bear witness to particularity without dependence
on foundational models. [19]
Only when funding agencies and socio-political agendas can accept
configurations of overlap and interdependence, can boundaries be crossed,
new territories charted in defiance of canonic enclosures, and can area
studies be transfigured in new maps to become truly enhancing, unburdened
by territorial, exclusionary and proprietary impulses. [20] Only then --
for me at any rate -- can we hope to sustain academic training that produces,
in Hyden's words, "major theoretical and methodological insights with implications"
across the disciplines and planet. [21]
The relationship between African Studies and Africana Studies
has been fraught with just such problems. Accounts of their interaction
is not unlike a romantic relationship in which the partners spend more
time discussing why one doesn't close the tube of toothpaste, or why one
doesn't like the other's friends, rather than enjoying their possibly limited
time together. Houston Baker has written poignantly of shifting horizons,
contested spaces, and simulacra in this regard. [22] While acknowledging
the political reality, and ground reality, of such shifts and contests,
it must be recognized that there is much to be gained from conversation.
In a recently published article, Sabra Webber has -- in an echo of Snead
-- suggested resistance to "the flattening steamroller of theory." [23]
She decries the fact that the innovative perspectives of Ranajit Guha and
his Subaltern Group have made only the narrowest of inroads into area studies.
I join Webber in inviting conversations between the disciplines, in urging
support and funding for the `small voices' in a way the Subaltern groups
are doing. This can surely be done without sacrificing whatever may be
gained from retaining area studies nomenclature and administrative autonomy.
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I should like to suggest that circumscribed studies
-- whether they are African Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Asian and Middle
Eastern Studies, or whatever -- are utterly desirable for the excellent
broad-based training they offer, provided we not remain wedded to our areas.
We must not forget that however marginal, Maritime Studies, Peace Studies,
Subaltern Studies and the more recognizable Folklore Studies, Music, and
History of Art, have successfully questioned the ultimately arbitrary boundaries
of the academy. Indeed, as Webber has observed, in the field of Middle
Eastern Studies, it is in Folklore that much innovative scholarship has
flourished. (Regrettably, one of the few doctoral Folklore programs in
the country, here at Penn, has been declared "not a priority" and is on
its way out. [24])
The ability to question and cross the very boundaries area studies
erect must be constitutive of our academic identity, and of our intellectual
honesty. We must distance ourselves from configurations that require borders,
except inasmuch as these identities are translated into provisionally meaningful
administrative units.
It is, I confess, with great satisfaction that in spite of, and
because of, my area studies background I am able to be part of a Department
of Humanities at an Indian Ocean University, and purvey a serenely conflicted
identity both as an Africanist, and not.
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
*NOTES*
[1] This is the slightly revised text of a paper presented at `Cross-Currents
in Africa,' the Fifth Annual African Studies Consortium Workshop held at
the University of Pennsylvania on 17 October 1997. I am grateful to Sandra
Barnes and the African Studies Center for including me in this workshop,
and to Lynette Loose for her support and kindness.
[2] A revised version of that paper appears under the title `Culture's
Permeable Frontiers' in *The Zimbabwean Review* 3/4 (October-December 1997),
12-14. I am grateful to Carole Pearce for having kindly solicited it for
publication.
[3] Founded in 1910.
[4] Edward W. Said, *Orientalism* (New York 1978); cf. Aijaz Ahmad,
*In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures* (London 1994).
[5] *The Philadelphia Inquirer* (18 December 1991); *The Daily
Pennsylvanian* (23 March 1992).
[6] `Oriental Studies Graduate Students' Poll on the Name of the
Department' [1992]. I am grateful to Peggy Guinan and Diane Bergin Moderski
for having made this circular available to me.
[7] Remembering, with Korzybski, that the map is not, and can
never be, the territory.
[8] Cf. James L. Conyers, Jr, `Introduction,' in idem (ed), *Africana
Studies. A Disclipinary Quest for Both Theory and Method* (Jefferson, NC
and London 1997), 1; and Darlene Clark Hine, `Black Studies: An Overview,'
in Conyers (ed), *Africana Studies* 7-8.
[9] Basil Davidson, `On Revolutionary Nationalism: The Legacy
of Cabral,' in *Race and Class* 27/3 (Winter 1986), 43.
[10] Goran Hyden, `African Studies in the Mid-1990s: Between Afro-Pessimism
and Amero-Skepticism,' in *African Studies Review* 39/2 (September
1996), 1-17.
[11] Cf. Edward W. Said, *Culture and Imperialism* (New York 1994
[1993]), 16: "[the liabilities] have much to do not only with the native
manipulators, who also use them to cover up contemporary faults, corruptions,
tyrannies, but also with the embattled imperial contexts out of which they
came and in which they were felt to be necessary."
[12] Houston A. Baker, `Black Studies: A New Story,' in Conyers
(ed), *Africana Studies* 31. Baker does acknowledge that American universities
are also sites of resistance.
[13] Said, *Culture and Imperialism* 336.
[14] Gillian Beer, `The island and the aeroplane: the case of
Virginia Woolf', in Homi K. Bhabha (ed), *Nation and Narration* (London
and New York 1990), 266.
[15] Said, *Culture and Imperialism* 15.
[16] James Snead, `European pedigrees/African contagions: nationality,
narrative, and communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed,' in Bhabha (ed),
*Nation and Narration* 245: "Perhaps the most important aspect of cultural
contagion is that by the time one is aware of it, it has already happened.
Contagion, being metonymic (con+tangere = `touching together'), involves...
an actual process of contacts between people, rather than a quantitative
setting of metaphorical value... Opposed to Dr Johnson's `pedigree' that
sought to discover lost, but recoverable differences, contagion represents
the existence of recoverable affinities between disparate races of people...
Even as collection domesticates and organizes barriers and distances, contagion
seems to have already made obsolete the barriers to its own spread."
[17] All quotations from Snead, `European pedigrees/African contagions,'
238.
[18] See Françoise Lionnet, *Postcolonial Representations:
women, literature, identity* (Ithaca, NY 1995), 2.
[19] Adapting Lionnet, *Representations* 34, and Roger Toumson,
`The Question of Identity in Caribbean Literature,' in *Journal of Caribbean
Studies* 5 (Fall 1986), 134, whom Lionnet cites.
[20] Cf. Said, *Culture and Imperialism* 317.
[21] Hyden, `African Studies,' 13. For Hyden, Robert Bates, Valentin
Mudimbe and Jean O'Barr, *Africa in the Disciplines* (Chicago 1993) demonstrates
this for African Studies.
[22] Baker, `Black Studies' in Conyers (ed), *Africana Studies*
31.
[23] Sabra J. Webber, `Middle East Studies & Subaltern Studies,'
in *Middle East Studies Association Bulletin* 31/1 (July 1997), 12.
[24] *The Daily Pennsylvanian* (16 October 1997).
I.
Oriental Studies | II. Asian and African Languages
and Literature | III. Humanities | Conclusion
| *NOTES*
|
