From the Director

James A.Pritchett, African Studies Center Director

2007-08 promises to be an exciting year of growth for the African Studies Center (ASC) at Boston University.  Our recent success in the US Department of Education Title VI competition confirms our emergence as one of this nation's premier programs of African Studies.  The concomitant infusion of new resources will greatly strengthen our African Language Program, expand our capacity to support graduate education, facilitate the production of Africa-focused programming for campus and community audiences and intensify collaborative relations with other African studies programs, nationally and internationally.

Sadly, we acknowledge the passing on June 10th of Gretchen Walsh who headed the African Studies Library for thirty years, served on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and was a vital force in the development of the Africana Librarians Council.  Her immense bibliographical knowledge, her keen sense of the role of modern libraries in the research process and her enthusiasm for working directly with young scholars will be irreplaceable.

The Center also acknowledges the retirement of John Priestley Hutchison who served as African Language Coordinator for twenty-seven years, teacher and scholar par excellence and founding editor of Mother Tongue Editions, a non-profit publishing organization whose purpose is to facilitate and encourage African language literacy both in Africa and abroad.

Concomitantly, the African Studies Center welcomes Zoliswa Mali as the new Coordinator of Southern African Languages with a special focus on isiZulu and isiXhosa.  Dr. Mali received her Doctorate in Second-Language Acquisition, founded the Zulu language program at the University of Iowa, and received advanced pedagogical training at the National African Language Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin.  Her research focuses on strategies utilized by second-language learners in cyber-environments.  The use of computers and digital technologies as language learning tools has increased several-fold in recent years.  Yet, few have rigorously studied how students actually use these technologies; how they adapt and develop approaches that compensate for the absence of lingual and extra-lingual clues as characterized by communications in cyberspace.  Dr. Mali’s work has great potential for fundamentally recasting the role of technology in language learning approaches.

Our program in the African humanities will continue to expand thanks to the addition of Odile Cazenave, a specialist in Francophone African literature and film, and Cynthia Becker, an art historian whose specialties range from Berber women's cultural production to African arts in the New World.

Under the leadership of James C. McCann and Michael DiBlasi, the new Program for the Study of the African Environment (PSAE) will continue to emerge as a semi-autonomous institute within the African Studies Center to promote interdisciplinary research on the environmental history and human ecology of Africa.  Its goal is to develop a better understanding of the complexities of human interactions with the environment through the integration of research perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological and earth sciences.  The semester-long Study Abroad Program in Niamey, Niger has a new re-invigorated curriculum and now provides students access to structured internships with a diverse array of local and global development agencies operating in the Sahel.  A new Study Abroad option in Dakar, Senegal, focused on art, music and culture was successfully inaugurated during the summer of 2006.  And finally, the new President of the University has asked the African Studies Program to play a key role in formulating the "The Global Future of Boston University."

For 53 years Boston University has been widely acknowledged as a center of excellence for African Studies.  The ASC has not only attracted stellar graduate students from across America, but it has also brought a steady stream of aspiring African intellectuals to Boston as well.  ASC-trained individuals now occupy positions of university leadership in Senegal, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa.  Closer to home, Boston University graduates can be found in key positions in African Studies, social science and humanities programs throughout the nation's university system, making policy decisions on Capitol Hill, generating new ideas in think tanks and working in the applied arena of non-governmental organizations.
The African Studies Center is also well known for resisting the trend to move African Studies toward departmental status within the academy.  It has long been our belief that Africa is simply too big a geographic place and too grand a cultural concept to be mastered in all its complex dimensions or reduced to a single field of study.  The epistemological hybridity and the ad hoc juxtapositions at the core of many African Studies departments often produce students insufficiently grounded in any particular intellectual domain to contribute meaningfully to the great scholarly debates, pragmatic initiatives or development challenges of the day.  Yet, theoretical advances and methodological innovations continue to emerge through rigorous disciplined-based training and research, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach in generating knowledge of Africa.  Concomitantly, the African Studies Center, through its wide ranging seminars, workshops, community outreach and publications programs, has long served as an interdisciplinary crucible from which generations of students have emerged well grounded in their own disciplines and confident in their abilities to appropriately integrate the advances of other disciplines as well.  The African Studies Center has thus chosen to remain a program, rather than a department, and seeks to infuse the study of Africa widely and deeply throughout the university's many curricular programs.

The African Studies Center intends to build on this legacy.  We seek to maintain and even expand our excellence in the social sciences and humanities while reaching out in a more deliberate fashion to professional schools and applied programs throughout the Boston University system.  For an increasingly globalized workforce, cultural knowledge of the place where one practices one's profession is nearly as important as knowledge of the profession itself.  We, therefore, endeavor to cultivate at Boston University an environment where students can move seamlessly between disciplines, merging professional training and African cultural studies, developing career trajectories that bring into productive juxtaposition varying combinations of anthropology, economics, history, international relations, political science, public health, theology, medicine, management, and computational and applied sciences - all centered around programmatic engagement with Africa.  The task ahead is to lower the barriers that have traditionally compartmentalized teaching and learning and, instead, unleash the creative potential inherent in increased cooperation across disciplines and departments, colleges and campuses.  Exciting new Africa-focused initiatives are currently being developed in African American Studies, the African Presidential Archives and Research Center, The College of Communication, and the Schools of Education, Management, Medicine, Public Health and Theology.  The current role of the African Studies Center is to enrich the academic experience of students in these programs and to encourage and serve as a focal point for collaborative action among university units.  We invite all at Boston University to join with us in furthering these goals.

James A. Pritchett

2007-08