From the Archives: African Studies at Columbia

African studies at Columbia has always been global in orientation. Long before formal institutes and programs were established, African and diasporic thinkers, many of whom studied at Columbia, were already working across geographical boundaries, connected through migration, education, and shared political struggles. These networks, built by students, workers, soldiers, and political delegates, linked Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. They created intellectual communities that exceeded any single institution and fostered Pan-African networks and spaces for learning about the histories and peoples of the African continent.

This early global orientation to the study of the continent emerged out of necessity. Shaped by the Atlantic slave trade and empire, these connections reflected a shared experience marked by racism and violence. Africans and people of African descent were also confronted with intellectual justifications for this hierarchy, from arguments used to legitimize the slave trade to later claims of a European “civilizing mission,” and philosophical traditions that cast Africa as primitive or outside history. In response, they sought ways to restore Africa to world history.

In the early twentieth century, through imperialism, labor migration, education, and war, African and diasporic thinkers encountered one another across continents and forged networks for shared debates about history, civilization, and political futures. These exchanges were not merely intellectual but responded to racialized narratives that positioned Africa outside modernity. In this context, recovering Africa’s past became a political and epistemic project.

World-historical frameworks were used to situate Africa alongside Europe and Asia rather than outside history. Intellectuals turned to these frameworks to argue for an African past marked by political complexity, civilizational achievement, and participation in global processes, thereby challenging both colonial hierarchies and academic assumptions about Africa’s place in the world.

The 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia became a particularly important moment, prompting debates across newspapers, student organizations, churches, and political networks that connected Columbia to Harlem and Harlem to the continent. Ethiopia’s status as an independent African state gave the crisis global symbolic significance, and the League of Nations’ failure to protect a member state pushed movements for African and Black liberation forward.

Columbia’s own archival record reflects this broader story. African studies developed through interdisciplinary collaboration, transnational partnerships, and engagement with diaspora intellectual traditions. In this series, I reflect on the archives of African Studies at Columbia and beyond, using them to think about the historical formation of global African intellectual thought and its relevance today.