Teaching Africa and international studies: Forum introduction

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies, the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency, but they are limited by the resources available to them, and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article outlines some of the key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow

A sociological dilemma: race, segregation, and US sociology

US sociology has been historically segregated in that, at least until the 1960s, there were two distinct institutionally organized traditions of sociological thought – one black and one white. For the most part, however, dominant historiographies have been silent on that segregation and, at best, reproduce it when addressing the US sociological tradition. This is evident in the rarity with which scholars such as WEB Du Bois, E Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’, as Saint-Arnaud calls them, are presented as core sociological voices within histories of the discipline. This article addresses the absence of African American sociologists from the US sociological canon and, further, discusses the implications of this absence for our understanding of core sociological concepts. With regard to the latter, the article focuses in particular on the debates around equality and emancipation and discusses the ways in which our understanding of these concepts could be extended by taking into account the work of African American sociologists and their different interpretations of core themes