Introduction to African American Studies

About this book

Highly Recommended. All levels/libraries--CHOICE Everything you need to teach African American Studies is in this book.--Ahmad Rahman Associate Professor of History University of Michigan. There is an ongoing debate as to whether African American Studies is a discipline or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Some scholars assert that African American Studies use a well-defined common approach in examining history politics and the family in the same way as scholars in the disciplines of economics sociology and political science. Other scholars consider African American Studies multidisciplinary a field somewhat comparable to the field of education in which scholars employ a variety of disciplinary lenses-be they anthropological psychological historical etc. --to study the African world experience. In this model the boundaries between traditional disciplines are accepted and researches in African American Studies simply conduct discipline based an analysis of particular topics. Finally another group of scholars insists that African American Studies is interdisciplinary an enterprise that generates distinctive analyses by combining perspectives from different traditional disciplines and synthesizing them into a unique framework of analysis.