Dr. Walton R. Johnson recently resigned as chair of Rutgers University’s Africana Studies department in protest of a proposal that he says attacks the very existence of his department and discipline.
“The plan to remove African languages and literature from Africana Studies denies the very legitimacy and raison d’etre of our discipline,” Johnson says. “Our discipline is founded on the conceptual, intellectual, and pedagogical basis that it makes sense to have people who study Africa and the African diaspora together in one multi-disciplinary department. That’s our raison d’etre. That’s why we exist. Not just at Rutgers but across the country.”
The Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) is proposing to transfer the African languages and literature components, including faculty and courses, in Africana Studies into a new department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literature that the school plans to create next year.
SAS Acting Executive Dean Dr. Ziva Galili says that in no way does she mean to question the academic legitimacy of Africana Studies.
“But, at the same time, I believe that students will be served better and languages will be taught better if they are taught in a department that concentrates on teaching languages and literature,” she says. “Language teaching … is not like other disciplines. Historians, political scientists, economists and sociologists have fairly similar formats of teaching.
“The experience of teaching and the experience of learning languages are very different from other areas,” she adds. “Languages have to be taught in small groups, repetition is very important, and there are pedagogical issues that are unique to languages.”
At least two Africana Studies professors—Dr. Ousseina D. Alidou and Dr. Alamin Mazrui—would be transferred totally or partly (partial lines) to the new department if the proposal is approved. Alidou is the department’s director of African Languages and Literature, and Mazrui is a newly hired professor whose expertise is in the political sociology of language in Africa and comparative literature in the African Diaspora and Africa.
