What Black Studies is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work1

[...] the truncation of the time/space coordinates of memory - the amputation of memory as a consequence of the failure of educational institutions whose task it was to re-inscribe those memories as a critical element of equipping Africans to negotiate their futures - precedes the crisis that informs the great confusion over the nature and intellectual thrust of Africana Studies.5 The crisis and a question Shorn of the idea that contemporary Black life is but the most immediate iteration of a long-view historical genealogy and tethered to the idea of linking Black life with the experience of enslavement, we have, predictably, reached a stage in our intellectual life where our resistance has been dissolved. The challenge for African intellectual work and workers remains the same as that for all knowledge work and workers: to ask and answer the fundamental questions of human existence and to leverage answers by drawing first on the most familiar, richest and most accessible deep well of human experience, namely the one native to the cultural arc out of which one emerges as a human being and as a custodian to the received inscriptions of the group, as a "representative thinker."