THE CEA FORUM - Summer/Fall 2010 - Student-Centered Designs of Pan-African Literature Courses

Oct 15, 2026

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Student-Centered Designs of Pan-African Literature Courses argues for a teaching methodology that combines reading assignments, journals, film presentations, and lectures to create an environment where students actively exchange ideas. The presentation explains how Pan-Africanism connects African history, literature, and cultures across the Black diaspora, including the social and political contexts that shaped early and later expressions of this intellectual tradition. It traces key debates that influenced the emergence of African American Studies and related methodologies such as Africalogy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages27

Reading Time42 min

AccessFree to download

Student-Centered Designs of Pan-African Literature Courses

Defining Pan-Africanism

Developing Pan-Africanism and African American Studies

THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 Student-Centered Designs of Pan-African Literature Courses BABACAR M’BAYE Kent State University A student-centered teaching methodology is an essential ingredient of a successful PanAfrican literary course. Using such an approach, I combine reading assignments with journals, film presentations, and lectures in a productive learning environment in which I play the role of invisible facilitator of intellectual exchange. My method incorporates a variety of Pan-African literary and historical works that help students understand the relations between Blacks of Africa and the Diaspora. Defining Pan-Africanism Studying Pan-Africanist teaching methodologies requires us to define Pan-Africanism. The term Pan-Africanism describes an intellectual tradition and a political movement which examines the relationships among the history, literature, and cultures of Blacks in Africa and the Diaspora. The term “Black Diaspora” describes the regions outside of Africa where Black people live due to historical forces such as slavery, voluntary migrations, and globalization. In African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (2001), Isidore Okpewho argues that “diaspora THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 represents a global space, a worldwide web, that accounts as much for the mother continent as for wherever in the world her offspring may have been driven by the unkind forces of history”(xiv). These historical forces also include the increasing movement of people, cultures, and knowledge across space. The concept of “Pan-Africanism” also identifies an ongoing political movement in which Blacks have asking for a fair share in the distribution of the advances of modernity and democracy they helped build. In African People in the Global Village: An Introduction to PanAfrican Studies (1998), John K. Marah describes the plight of ancestors of these Blacks who were alienated in the “Western city and métropole” during the nineteenth century only to be excluded from their “white brothers and sisters”who had left them“up country, in the village, tilling the soil” of their masters (79) . As Marah states, these alienated Blacks invented “PanAfricanism” as “a psychological response to [this] powerlessness and a desire to act upon the environment in which Africans found themselves, rather than remain the ones being acted upon without meaningful resistance”(80). Tracing this resistance against powerlessness to an earlier period, Victor Oguejiofor Okafor writes in “The Place of Africalogy in the University Curriculum”(1996): “Indeed, as far back as the late 18th century, conscious Africans such as Olaudah Equiano had begun to affirm African humanity in the face of assaults from without”(690). This early Pan-Africanism in which Black women such as Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, the Hart Sisters also participated had spread across the Americas and Africa by the end of the eighteenth century. Marah writes: THE CEA FORUM Summer/Fall 2010 As a group of people barred from the white man’s higher places in the United States, the Caribbean Islands, South America, Africa, and elsewhere, a certain racial consciousness began to emerge in the early 1900s that caught the attention of the “talented tenth” on the continents of Europe, America, and Africa. As early as the 1800s Toussaint L’Ouverture, David Walker, and others began to address African people’s international conditions. (80) In the 1960s, a new form of Pan-Africanism developed as a modern political movement in which Blacks in the United States were fighting for recognition of their humanity and intellect in both American society and its academic institutions. This Pan-Africanism developed under the shadows ofthe Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, leading to the inclusion of the field of African American Studies in mainstream American academic instituti

FAQs

What teaching components does the author use in a Pan-African literature course?

The author combines reading assignments with journals, film presentations, and lectures, positioning the instructor as an “invisible facilitator” for intellectual exchange.

How does the document define Pan-Africanism and the Black diaspora?

Pan-Africanism is described as an intellectual tradition and political movement examining relationships among history, literature, and cultures of Blacks in Africa and the diaspora. The Black diaspora refers to regions outside Africa where Black people live due to historical forces such as slavery, migrations, and globalization.

What role do the debates about African American Studies play in the course’s historical overview?

The document explains that scholarly debates at majority-White institutions helped shape theories and institutional inclusion of African American Studies, alongside competing perspectives within Black cultural and political movements.

Oct 15, 2026

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