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Article: African American Studies
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES,
a field of academic and intellectual endeavors
—
variously labeled Africana Studies, Afro-American Studies, Black Studies, Pan-African Studies
—
that was a direct product of the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The quests for African liberation, the civil rights movements, and the black power and black arts movements had created an ambience in which activist members of the faculties at colleges and universities and black students who had come of age during the late 1960s sought to foster revolutionary changes in the traditional curricula. In search of relevance
—
to use a word that became a clich
é
during ...