Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

204 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
University of Pennsylvania
The Project
The proposal submitted by the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction
with Princeton University, was entitled “Reshaping Afro-American Studies:
Transnationalism and a New Cultural Studies for the Americas.” The threeyear
initiative was co-directed by Houston A. Baker, Director of the Center
for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania,
and Arnold Rampersad, 29 Director of the Programs in American
Studies and in African American Studies at Princeton University. Its goal
was to work collaboratively toward “a productive and scholarly redefinition
of America and the Americas as a whole” by developing “interdisciplinary,
transnational models for the study of the Americas” (specifically, the
United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America).
In format, this project involved the convening of a series of seminars
held at the two universities. As determined by an advisory group of faculty
from the two schools, the first year featured two major lectures—one on
the Atlantic Diaspora and the other on Chicanos in Chicago. (A third seminar
on New Orleans was canceled due to the illness of the presenter.) In
the second year, there were six seminars on one theme: “Interconnections
and Flows of Religion between Latin America and the United States.” The
third year’s seminars addressed Native American, Caribbean, and Canadian
identity. Although Penn and Princeton provided many of the seminar’s
faculty participants, there was significant representation from other
local schools—Temple, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Villanova,
among them. In addition, a number of graduate students attended
the meetings, and Ford funds were used each year to employ a graduate student
who oversaw “seminar logistics” and served as a research assistant for
the project.
It is noteworthy that this Ford project appears to be the only one
under review that involved a multi-ethnic comparative perspective. In addition,
it was the only one with a primarily Western Hemispheric focus. It
is a foregone conclusion that, as it enters the new century, African Ameri-