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Out of One, Many African: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa. Edited by WILLIAM G. MARTIN AND MICHAEL O. WEST. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, i999. Pp. x + 237. $19.05 (paper).
In 1994, the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois hosted a symposium, as it has for over twenty years, to reassess the state of the study of Africa. This book is the result of their stocktaking, an interesting collection of essays that seek to explain the crisis of African studies of the recent past.
In their lengthy and theme-setting introduction, Martin and West set out to examine the "Africanist enterprise," as an academic project and as a political event, plumbing the past of African studies, critiquing the present, and suggesting the future. The same issues are taken up more specifically for the United States in their own joint chapter later in the book. Their assessment is not entirely positive, and they address African studies very much in the same spirit that Edward Said addressed the question of Orientalism. While departing from Said in many particulars, they still see African studies in the West as part of a larger politically motivated framework that seeks to define Africa for EuroAmerican benefit and to assist in domination. They are careful to point out how much African studies was dominated by Euro-American scholars (even though African Americans were often the pioneers) and how often it was financed and manipulated by...