She says that hip-hop’s place in popular culture and its aesthetic basis on the notion of “flow,” or dynamic change, make it a uniquely difficult subject for academia to keep up with.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is raise the level of hip-hop scholarship,” she says. “What we have to do is think clearly about how to talk about hip-hop from various disciplinary perspectives. One of the things we’re trying to do is get beyond the descriptive aspect of hip-hop. We need to develop methodologies to see what’s going on.”

Francis Abiola Irele, “by all accounts the dominant scholar in the field of Francophone African literature,” according to Gates, was hired in the spring.

He will teach about literary movements in America and in Africa and the Caribbean—as well as the continuum between them—and says he also hopes to start a cultural program that will promote modern African classical music and art.

Other new hires include Marla F. Frederick, an incoming assistant professor who will focus on religion as an assistant professor, and the New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, who will be a visiting lecturer on the history of black cinema.

The department also hopes to cross-list courses taught by author Zadie Smith, who will teach several courses with the English department this year as a visiting lecturer.

Gate says the new faculty were not hired in response to West’s and Appiah’s departures but to fill positions that had been previously available.

“You identify subject areas that you need, and you go to the best person in the world to fill them, like all other Harvard positions,” Gates says.

Come Together

Akyeampong, chair of the Committee for African Studies, says the move towards Africa has been imminent for the past ten years.

“What we have been seeing at Harvard is an increase in demand for African studies,” he says. “We put together statistics on this as we made the case before the University administration, to the point where it was obvious that it would be in the interest of Harvard to replace the certificate [in African studies offered by the Committee]—the value of which was unclear—with an undergraduate concentration.”

He says that world developments in the past 20 years, such as increased African migrations to North America and Europe, catalyzed a major shift in the academic field itself and raised awareness among scholars of bringing together African-American studies and African studies.

In addition, rather than looking for “cultural survivals,” such as African words or religious practices that have been preserved overseas, scholarship now looks at concepts of hybridity and creolization, at how African and American culture have impacted each other.

“What comes out is neither distinctly African nor American,” he says. “Now, we are looking at the cultural interface in very novel ways, at things like material culture and cultural transformations instead of cultural survivals.”

Akyeampong says he is excited about the idea of creating a new area of study—diaspora studies—in the department, which he hopes will help build connections between African and African-American studies.