ABSTRACT
The problem is that the whole Afro-American intellectual project in the twentieth century has been a project of vindicating Afro-American or African life, and this is a profoundly problematic matter because, although historiography based on reconstituting a different idea of Africa, reconstituting a different idea of Afro-Americans, is an antiracist enterprise, still, it is a deeply parasitic intellectual project. The fight around Afro-American Studies, and the way in which it has been incorporated into the campus, has also, in some sense, hindered the fight for making the curriculum racially more cosmopolitan. This not only presupposed a certain parochialism for Afro-American intellectual interests—black folks who didn't study things related to blacks were not viewed as something to be sought after—but it eliminated the need for entrenched departments to have their own outreach to try to integrate their faculties.
