Increasingly, African American Studies has become an interdisciplinary field that focuses on race as a social construction. Our department has led the field with its emphasis on the African Diaspora and the cultures, patterns of social organization, political economies, life conditions, etc. of various African-based societies and communities in the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, Europe, and other areas of the world. In addition to the development of African American Studies as a coherent and innovative discipline, departmental efforts are focused on fundamental reformulations of the theories, frameworks and methods employed for understanding race and ethnicity. The field of African American Studies is new and developing. Our department has managed to establish itself at the forefront of the intellectual development of the field.
In Fall 1997, the department welcomed its first entering Ph.D. class of 14 students whose focus of study will be on Africa and the African Diaspora. This semester, five more students were admitted to the program. The Ph.D. program is the culmination of the department's renewed focus on the close to one billion people of African descent scattered across several regions of the world. Such a focus is reflected in changes we have made in our undergraduate curriculum. It emerges out of a conviction that a sound understanding of the realities of the life and culture of persons of African descent in the United States cannot but take into account the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, the plantation, and migration. Nor can such understandings ignore the development of ideologies of supremacy rooted in notions of race that emerged within the context of colonialism and slavery. The focus on Africa and the African Diaspora allows the use of comparative frameworks for the understanding of the specific realities of persons of African descent wherever they may find themselves.
Our efforts at the development of the field were assisted over the past three years through our Frontiers in African Diaspora Studies lectures series, funded by Ford Foundation and co-sponsored by several departments and units on campus. We have invited to campus a number of scholars to present their research and creative endeavors to the Berkeley community. The lecture series was organized in preparation for our Ph.D. program and in support of our efforts to develop the theoretical base and analytical frameworks for African Diaspora Studies and for studies of Diasporas in general. We have organized, also, jointly with the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for the Study of American Cultures, a Berkeley Diaspora Studies Colloquium designed to develop our understanding of Diaspora and Diasporic identity. The colloquium, in its third year, has provided an opportunity to members of faculty and graduate students from several departments at Berkeley to present their most recent work on Diaspora to the campus community and, particularly, to scholars sharing similar intellectual and research interests.
The department has continued its successful St. Clair Drake Graduate Cultural Studies Forum, begun three years ago. This was developed to provide the opportunity to graduate students throughout the campus working on issues of culture and identity to present papers reflecting the direction of their research.
We see all this as important to the department's stated mission of developing the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the study of Diasporic identity, of Diaspora Studies proper, and of Africa and the African Diaspora in particular by bringing together as wide a range of scholars as possible, both internationally, nationally, and campus-wide.
The department is also engaged in significant efforts at community outreach with its Poetry for the People program. Poetry for the People, while continuing its vibrant university-wide effort, has also expanded its reach nationally from its Bay Area locations. This expansion contributed to the program's efforts aimed at exposing high-school students and community residents to the world of poetry writing and appreciation while, at the same time, introducing them to the world of academia.
Among the number of programs and activities organized by the African American Studies Department is included the annual Graduation Ceremony which is one of the largest events of the African American community held on the Berkeley campus. Approximately 150-200 undergraduate/graduate students participate each year in the graduation ceremony which normally attracts over 7000 people.
The success of our efforts on both the intellectual and practical planes has resulted in considerable increases in the number of undergraduates at Berkeley seeking to major in African American Studies. Today, the department has more majors than at any point in its 34 year history. It continues to make significant and growing contributions to the debate on race, ethnicity, culture and identity in the United States and internationally. These have proven to be the most explosive issues of the 20th century.
Other programs which the department sponsors are the St. Clair Drake Graduate Cultural Studies Forum, a discussion group for graduate students and faculty campus-wide working in areas of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies. Poetry for the People hosts nationally recognized poets who participate in the annual Poetry November Event. This event has raised funds for Haitians, Black South African and victims in former Yugoslavia
The department has initiated additional programs and research projects with support of the Ford Foundation grant. Its colloquium series entitled "Frontiers in African American Studies," has enabled the department to invite leading scholars from throughout the African Diaspora to present their research in African and African Diaspora Studies. The grant also supported a High School and Community College Instructor Training Workshop. The workshop provides high school and community college instructors resource materials and information, as well as intensive instruction on teaching cultural studies and issues to changing student populations.
In March, 1996 the University of California approved a proposal submitted by the department to begin the country's first Ph.D. program in African Diaspora Studies. The first graduate class entered in Fall 1997. The program is interdisciplinary and will prepare students to use and develop theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches to critical issues relating to the study of the realities and conditions of persons of African descent wherever they may be located in the world. Intellectual efforts will focus upon the development of a multidisciplinary approach applied to the study of racial and ethnic behavior in all its manifestations, issues of development and underdevelopment, domination and power, self-determination, mutual cooperation and theories of aesthetic and creative expression. The Department is also part the Ethnic Studies graduate consortium that offers a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies. AAS faculty teach, advise and serve on students' orals and dissertation committees in this graduate program.
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