Word: afro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell, who has himself turned to fiction in his recent work on civil rights law, recalls the discussion between Gates and Huggins: "Basically, they said that the great thrust of Afro-American history was to correct the record--to show that Black folk played a very important role," Bell says. "But the historical role tended to be a correction of the record, while the literary people can provide a continuous range of views about the record...
When the first Afro-American Studies departments were born out of the turbulent student activism of the 1960s, it was the historians such as John Hope Franklin and John Blassingame--the first head of Yale's Afro-Am Department--who led the march toward developing the new discipline...
...report that Huggins wrote for the Ford Foundation in 1985 on the state of Afro-American Studies, the Harvard historian says that "I have written here mainly of historians, in part because they were asked to play a major role in [the founding of] Afro-American studies." Huggins, whose report examines the future of the discipline as well as its past, went on to say that "to the extent there was a field, it depended on [the historians...
...attempting to explain the shift towards literature within Afro-American studies, scholars focus on three areas: the increasing complexity of the political issues surrounding Black Americans, the theoretical sophistication offered by feminist and deconstructionist approaches to literature and changes in the composition of academia...
...Houston Baker, a University of Pennsylvania professor whose name is often mentioned with Gates, says, "The question by the end of the 1970s was how do you move largely political assertions about the autonomy of Afro-American culture and literature toward a more theoretical plane...