ABSTRACT
When the Black studies movement was inaugurated in the late 1960s, it represented the intellectual expression of political Pan-Africanism in United States universities. It was formed to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities by centring community development, African and African descendant struggles for liberation and self-determination. The institutionalization of Black studies in the westernized university engendered a turn away from these early commitments. By the late 1980s, when Black studies had become more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university, there was a noted and distinct absence of political economic and material critiques of racialized dispossession in its formulation, and an overwhelming overrepresentation of literary and cultural studies. This chapter argues that once Black studies became the object of academic disciplining and control through management by the westernized university, it became abstracted from its activist, community-oriented, and militant origins.
