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

2016; Indiana University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/africatoday.63.2.08

1527-1978

Beth Buggenhagen,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Area Studies and the Challenges of Creating a Space for Public Debate Beth Buggenhagen 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. If, as Mamadou Diouf argued at the symposium “African Studies and the Challenge of the ‘Global’ in the 21st Century” at Indiana University, also in the spring of 2016, the problem of African studies in Africa was its reception among continent-based scholars as imperialist knowledge, then what can we possibly make of the securitization of African studies in the United States at present? Is this not part of the reason that the area-based [End Page 82] humanities fields are now in a school of global studies? For example, the African studies program at Indiana University has been moved into the newly formed School of Global and International Studies. Africa is no longer a backwater in the foreign-service world: it is a frontline in the war on terror, as attacks over the past year in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso reveal. Scholars in the African humanities have good reason to be concerned about the instrumentalization of area studies for defense priorities. Our work provides legitimacy for defense-oriented projects. As Judith Byfield argued at our spring symposium, geopolitics cannot be the engine that drives knowledge production about Africa. If it seems as if scholars of the African humanities in schools of global studies concerned with “America’s Place in the World” have no seat at the table, then such a perspective is at odds with current directions in federal spending on culture. As James Pritchett, a past president of the African Studies Association, argued, culture matters; if not, the federal government would not be pouring money into the production of cultural knowledge. As Pritchett has argued, Title VI has not been reduced “by nearly $56 billion annually in the last three years alone” because culture is irrelevant. In fact, this decline has happened in tandem with an increase in “federal funds to military managed programs of language and cultural studies,” largely orchestrated by the Department of Defense. He enumerates the following examples: The Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in Monterey, California[,] receives nearly $345 million annually, over four times the funding provided to the 125 Title VI Centers combined. The Human Terrain System (HTS), an army program that employs social scientists to provide the military with cultural knowledge[,] has an annual budget of $150 million. AFRICOM’s new Socio-Cultural Research Advisory Team (SCRAT...