Prometheus 6   

Rebuilding Harvard's African Studies Dept.
By SARA RIMER

After a year of turmoil that saw two of its biggest stars defect to Princeton University, Harvard's celebrated Afro-American studies department will be refocused and expanded to include an African language program and a new major in African studies, the chairman of the department, Henry Louis Gates Jr., said yesterday.

Professor Gates, who at one point was so unhappy about the acrimony between his department and the Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers, that he too weighed offers to leave, said he had appointed five new faculty members, including two African scholars, one a critic of African literature and one a linguist.

His recruits also include a linguistic anthropologist who is one of the country's leading experts on hip-hop. Hip-hop had figured in the turmoil in Professor Gates's department, with Cornel West, one of the stars to leave Harvard, complaining that Mr. Summers had, among other things, been critical of his recording of a hip-hop CD entitled "Sketches of My Culture."

& Harvard is by no means the first university to merge African and African-American studies in one department, and to offer a major in African studies. But for the university to take such a step is a recognition that the African-American experience in the United States must be understood in relationship to Africa and the diaspora, several scholars said yesterday.

"This is where we're going these days in African-American studies," said John Thornton, an African historian who will join the African-American studies department at Boston University this fall. "It's been a trend intellectually. In the past 15 years, more and more people who are doing African-American history are increasingly interested in the African equation. On the other side, there are more Africanists who are recognizing that there is an American side to what they do."