Anniversaries are useful for they help us return to a specific moment, such as the creation of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University in 1969. The temporal framing offered by anniversaries is often a pretext to take stock of a particular sequence of events; anniversaries are subterfuges to remember, commemorate, and pay tribute but also disinter cumbersome corpses. Anniversaries test our vigilance and ability to submit these corpses to renewed autopsies. The term “Africana” reflects the worlding of Africa and the re- and translocation of its objects, subjects, and discourses within a diasporic network of relations (Hallen 2009, 8n2). From African to Africana studies, one can therefore identify a definitional and heuristic shift: like their postcolonial and decolonial counterparts, Africana scholars are engaged in the dismantling of (neo)colonial cartographies and in the creation of what Pheng Cheah calls “a world”— that is, a creative and discursive entity and realm of possibilities that are not reducible to the “epistemic violence” of “canonical literature” and the other “processes” shaping “how colonized subjects see themselves” and continue to see themselves “after decolonization” (2016, 19). Africana studies are concerned with Africa but also with the many cultural entanglements generated by African displacements and reterritorializations before and, above all, after the middle passage. Africana studies, then, provide the basis for analyzing African pasts and presents in Africa and beyond and anticipating future possibilities
