For the first time ever, scholars in the fields of Black Studies and Religious Studies have come together to discuss Africa’s role in teaching and learning about African-American religious traditions in the United States.
The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies, and the Center of Inquiry for the Liberal Arts collaborated to recruit fifteen scholars to come to campus for Consultation on the Interdisciplinary Teaching of the Black Experience. Three of the distinguished scholars - Dr. Maulana Karenga, Dr. Dwight Hopkins, and Dr. Victor Anderson - participated in a panel discussion Thursday night, October 25, 2007, in Korb Classroom on the “The Role of 'Africa' in African American Religious Historiographies.”
The scholars were well-versed in African-American history, African cultures, and curriculum approaches that address the two subjects. Their enthusiasm at the opportunity to increase dialog among their academic fields was evident Thursday night.
“To my knowledge this is the first time in the history of the United States…that African-American Religious Studies scholars and African-American Studies scholars have come together formally,” said Dr. Dwight Hopkins, Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago. “People will be reading about this for the next ten to fifteen years.”
In his allotted time, Dr. Hopkins proposed a teaching agenda, typology, and a definition of African-American religious studies. He suggested more specificity when referencing and analyzing African peoples, languages, and religious practices.
“The remnants of the retentions of African spirituality transcend a single individual and have multiple material expressions among the 40 million people of African descent in North America,” Hopkins said. “In a word, African Religious Studies is interdisciplinary, grounded in a profound sense of African lineage, and geared toward contemporary human flourishing and social relations equalities, and the norm is helping people for helping society.”
Dr. Victor Anderson stressed the topical limits of the current curriculum at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, where he is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics. For him, it is important that scholars go beyond the comfortable tradition of simply analyzing the black Christian church.
“The interdisciplinary teaching of the black experience is profoundly ethical. It’s ethical because of what’s at stake. It’s a stake in what I call an ethics of openness, an ethics that take the ambivalences of my own multipositionality and uses them to diacritically interrogate my own commitment to giving the best and the wisest interpretation of black experience with the widest ranges of sources and insights into the religious lives of black people.”
And, according to Dr. Karenga, it is by analyzing both oral and written African text that scholars can give greater meaning to and provide a wider perspective about the role of African culture in teaching the black experience and in improving the human condition. He cited the actions of Harriet Tubman to illustrate his point.
“When people talk about Harriet Tubman,” said Karenga, “it’s almost like a folk story. It does not add to reflective [analysis]. She said when I stepped across the line to freedom…I became sad because all the people that I love were back on the plantation in the holocaust of slavery. And I decided that day that I would spend my life going to get them so they can share in this good. At that moment she redefined freedom as a benefit of individual escape to the collective preference…of the whole community.”
Other scholars agreed the discussion panel was a historic event and the panelists themselves represented diverse elements of their fields.
“I think it’s great,” said Associate Professor of Religion Yvonne Chireau, one of the fifteen visiting scholars. “I think the people were very well chosen. They were of different representations, different disciplines, different generations and perspectives. There doesn’t have to be total agreement. [When there isn’t] we do intellectual work to try to find the answers.”
Dr. Hopkins agreed.
“I thought the panel was excellent because we had a broad and diverse view on the subject matter,” Hopkins said. “It’s also important to understand the historic nature of this event. For many of us who were around in the ’50s and ’60s, this is the first time that we can think of in the movement in the streets and the movement in the academy that…the subject matter of these two disciples have been brought together.”