Using, Producing, and Replacing Life?: Alchemy as Theory and Practice in Capitalism

This chapter focuses on the critique of area studies that comes from two sources: the disciplines of which it was a historical offshoot, and the areas it came to embrace as objects of knowledge. The discipline-based critique revolves around the observation that area studies are so turf-based that they know little else. It also focuses on the critique from the native that is hardly audible but needs to be heard and argues that, for the critique of area studies to be adequate, it needs to be joined to that of the disciplines. African studies were developed outside of Africa. It was a study of Africa, but not by Africans. If the postcolonial African academy was aggressively modernist and was discipline-based as any other university, the study of Africa in the Western academy continued to flourish as a preoccupation of an area-specific expertise. To study Africa today is to be profoundly subversive of the tradition of African studies.