Book Review of "Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa," by William G. Martin (Editor), Michael O. West (Editor)

Out of One, Many Africas, edited by William G. Martin and Michael O. West, lays out the current historical juncture in the study of Africa as an academic discipline.The volume provides broad coverage of the historic development of African studies.It presents the context of scholarly work connected with the most peripheralized region of the world: lack of resources precluding indigenous self-expression, struggles over defi nitions of insider and outsider, and over control of research funding agendas.Martin and West begin by introducing the contemporary scholarly factions, several representatives of which they brought together as participants in a 1994 annual symposium at the University of Illinois.The goal then and for this volume remains the same: to advance a dialogue that will help refocus African Studies.Part I of the volume comprises two selections on the origins of the Africanist establishment apart from and in confl ict with the Pan-African/ Africanity tradition; which is also described.The Africanist establishment was comprised of a large contingent of British and French colonial administrators, anthropologists, and journalists who fi rst began to conceive of Africans as having a society and history with the ending of colonialism.When the U.S. emerged post-WWII as hegemonic, it tapped these scholars to create its own version of African Studies as a form of area studies.These programs of African Studies resisted being subsumed under existing departments and insisted on separation of African people' s movements on the continent from those around the diaspora, which became the axial point of their clash with African American approaches.

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