Consecration, Induction, and the Field of Knowledge: Theorizing Awards

Western academia has long been premised on the organization of scholars not simply into localized interdisciplinary institutions of higher learning, but also into more specialized national and international academies, learned societies, and professional associations. This form of associational life emerged and proliferated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. As James F. English describes in The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, these associations developed a widespread custom of awarding prizes, medals, and trophies to individuals from diverse fields of cultural production and presenting them with “special tokens of esteem” in “a highly ritualized theater of gestures and countergestures” (Reference English2005:1, 5).

Such “tokens of esteem” have played a particularly important role in the field of scholarly production, which holds itself to standards at least partially outside the marketplace of creative supply and popular demand. Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1984) theorized this distinction as one between a “field of restricted production” (i.e., scholarship) and a “field of large-scale cultural production” (i.e., mass consumption). The former involves cultural goods produced for an audience of other producers (i.e., peers, or in Bourdieu’s words, “privileged clients and competitors”). The latter tends to be governed by market principles of mass consumption, where success in the field is determined by the scale of uptake by non-producers of a particular cultural product. A scholarly community such as African Studies is a field of restricted production that has developed its own criteria for evaluating its cultural goods, though a sub-field of large-scale production (for example, textbooks for undergraduate audiences or popular novels and films) also exists within this restricted space.

In his 2008 article on “Prize Proliferation,” Joel Best asserts that awards-giving tends to be constituted by three stages: establishment, selection, and presentation. A group of people establish an award by defining its terms and selection processes, identifying sources for its costs, and announcing it. An appointed group encourages submission and selects who will receive the award in a given cycle. They then announce the result and present the award to its recipient. Awards-granting is certainly generous (benefitting recipients with prestige and its attendant material rewards) and generative (incentivizing creativity, association, and affiliation). However, Best notes that winners are not the only beneficiaries. Awards-granting confers prestige and reputation on judges and on the institutions affiliated with winners. Awards ceremonies affirm the audience, its values, and its solidarity. And awards serve the granting organizations themselves by establishing and confirming the organization’s monopoly over what Bourdieu calls the “consecration” of scholarly producers (Reference Bourdieu1993; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2013). To put it more clearly, awards tend to lay claim to a particular field of knowledge, and they constitute and communicate the legitimacy and authority of an organization to establish standards, set agendas, and police the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Associations are not natural phenomena, emerging with clear borders, identities, and purposes. Rather they require considerable social and political work to cultivate a sense of purpose, definition, authority, and belonging to a knowledge community. In this article we take stock of the ASA GSP Prize with an aim to assess, and perhaps retool, the social work that is accomplished by awards in African Studies.

Awards, Associations, and the Worlds of African Studies

A rich scholarship has documented the trajectory and development of scholarship on Africa in the twentieth century in academic institutions throughout Africa, North America, and Europe (Ampofo Reference Ampofo2016; Anyidoho Reference Anyidoho2018; Branch Reference Branch2018; Guedj Reference Guedj2016; Iheka & Lawrance Reference Iheka and Lawrance2021; Martin Reference Martin2011; Pritchett Reference Pritchett2014; Robinson Reference Robinson and Zeleza2007; Zeleza Reference Zeleza1997). In the United States, some of the deepest roots emerged at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) under the leadership of intellectual greats such as sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and historian Carter G. Woodson (Pritchett Reference Pritchett2014), and in conversation with the African intellectuals and students they hosted, who for many decades were not welcome at predominantly White institutions in the US (Martin Reference Martin2011).Footnote ¹ At White institutions, the first scholars to study Africa in the United States tended to be White anthropologists, who in many cases ignored and devalued the existing contributions of Black scholars in the United States. There was, in the first half of the twentieth century, little scholarly interest or expertise about Africa in other disciplines at predominantly White institutions.

The African Studies Association was established in 1957 under the leadership of Melville J. Herskovits, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. The United States-based organization was born of a desire to redress what was seen as a lack of interest, attention, and support for the study of the African continent in American higher education. The Association initially defined and legitimated its claims on knowledge production about the African continent in terms of its alleged detachment and disinterest from historical relations of lineage, geography, and colonialism (Gershenhorn Reference Gershenhorn2007; Herskovits Reference Herskovits1958; Allman Reference Allman2019), that is, on a North American Whiteness that saw itself as separate from, and thus more objective than, both African-American and European scholarship related to the continent. This argument, and indeed Herskovits himself, explicitly sidelined the work of Du Bois and Woodson. Meanwhile, such claims were legitimated and strengthened by support from the US government, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. Over the next several decades, African Studies Centers funded by Title VI of the Higher Education Act (Pritchett Reference Pritchett2014) were founded across the US.Footnote ² Such centers, generally situated in historically White Research I universities, promoted the study of African languages and area studies with strategic importance for the United States’ security. Neither the United States’ own investment in Cold War struggles over Africa, nor its legacies of enslavement, racism, and ongoing dispossession of peoples of African descent in the US entered the accounting of White scholars’ “impartiality.”

The ASA today “encourages the production and dissemination of historical and contemporary knowledge about Africa,” including its “political, economic, social, cultural, artistic, scientific, and environmental landscapes” (ASA website, accessed September 7, 2021). Through its journals, annual meetings, exchange programs, and enhancement of scholarly and policy networks, the organization boasts over 2000 members. For many scholars, the ASA has provided a refuge from disciplinary scholarly associations where theory and research related to the African continent is often marginalized as too exceptional to contribute to mainstream scholarship. As Adam Branch has argued in his analysis of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cambridge, it is the work of African studies organizations to insist that

To be sure, ASA—like other African Studies institutions—has helped to incubate and center scholarship related to the African continent, supporting Branch’s assertion that disciplinary knowledge can be honed through the study of Africa, and that Africa can help us know the world. But, following in the footsteps of other giants such as Akosua Adomako Ampofo (Reference Ampofo2016), Amina Mama (Reference Mama2007), William G. Martin (Reference Martin2011), Oyekan Owomoyelo (Reference Owomoyelo1994), James Pritchett (Reference Pritchett2014), and Pearl Robinson (Reference Robinson and Zeleza2007), historian Jean Allman (Reference Allman2019) has documented the “hard-wiring of white privilege” into the structures and processes of African Studies through gate-keeping mechanisms (such as the awarding of prizes) that obscure the intellectual leadership and contributions of Black scholars and amplify the voices of White-trained White scholars.

Notably, Robinson observed that Title VI centers and their networks were one of only three “worlds” of African area studies; that is, “three spatially-differentiated spheres of endeavor” (Reference Robinson and Zeleza2007:235) that also include diasporic scholars, including HBCUs on the one hand, and African universities and research networks based on the African continent. She argues,

In addition to Robinson’s three US- and Africa-based worlds of inquiry, there are also regionally based African Studies organizations in Europe (AEGIS), Australasia, and the Pacific (AFSAAP), as well as country-based associations such as those in Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, The Netherlands, and Russia.

Despite the hubris of the African Studies Association’s moniker, which suggests the universalism and comprehensiveness of its knowledge production, the ASA’s claims to knowledge are unsurprisingly more parochial, tending to represent mainly (though not absolutely) the first of Robinson’s worlds. That is, ASA membership has tended to be dominated by scholars in historically White Research I institutions, although African Studies scholars themselves at these institutions represent a wider range of origins and identities. The other two of Robinson’s “worlds” are identifiable and bound together not only by broadly shared self-definitions, but also by their institutionalization in other membership-based scholarly associations.

In the diasporic world, the study of Africa has been part of intellectual life since long before 1957. As William G. Martin relates, “…propelled from below by black student demands at historically black colleges and universities—the [B]lack study of an international Africa became steadily more widespread…. Carter G. Woodson led the way” (Reference Martin2011:69–70). In institutional form, this diasporic network includes organizations such as the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA), which emerged directly from Black Caucus protests at the ASA meetings in Los Angeles in 1968 and Montreal in 1969 (Guedj Reference Guedj2016), the National Association of African-American Studies (NAAAS), and the Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), along with a plethora of diasporic discipline-specific organizations.

Unsurprisingly (and indeed it is very revealing that we even feel the need to call attention to this), African institutions also have a rich history of African Studies. Martin observes that it is rarely acknowledged that as African Studies expanded in the United States,

Of course today there are many African scholars working in North American, European, and African institutions who are actively engaged trans-continentally. Still, however, many Africa-based scholars do prioritize memberships with Africa-based institutions such as the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), university-based African Studies centers such as those at the Universities of Ghana, Ibadan, Lagos, Addis Ababa, and Cape Town, as well as continent-based disciplinary organizations whose knowledge production and relevance to the continent is more self-evident.Footnote ³ This rift bears important consequences for scholars on the continent, as well as for scholarship on Africa. As Professor Nana Akua Anyidoho of the University of Ghana observed of the US-centrism of African Studies at the 2018 ASA Annual Meeting:

This history points to the segmentation of African Studies that has occurred throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Joel Best argues that contemporary social conditions foster this kind of segmentation: “…they make it easy for people to break off to form new social worlds” (Reference Best2008). This segmentation, in turn, compels a desire for legitimation and distinction:

In short, we are interested in the way that awards do important work in African Studies to define and congeal the worlds of its scholarship. The ASA alone boasts fifteen awards. We are not here to argue that fifteen is too few nor too many, but rather to pose questions about what work such awards are doing in terms of knowledge production—particularly when it comes to the issues of induction, consecration, and segmentation mentioned above—and to ask if they might do more, or at least different, work.

The African Studies Association Graduate Student Paper Prize

As previously noted, the GSP Prize emerged in 2001 to recognize an exceptional paper by a graduate student who presented at the previous year’s annual meeting. The winner has the opportunity to develop the paper for publication in ASR. What distinguishes the GSP Prize from other awards such as the ASA Book Prize (formerly the Herskovits Prize), the Ogot Book Prize, and the ASA Film Prize is its focus on emerging scholars. A specific aim of the award is to identify, induct, even “capture” students at a moment when they may be exploring and soon committing to one or more of several possible scholarly communities. The GSP Prize therefore functions to assist with the social reproduction of the organization (by providing an incentive for students to attend the annual meeting) and to expand the core of the organization by cultivating and amplifying promising young scholarly voices. Below, we discuss the analytics of the prize winners to see how they might map onto the patterns of knowledge productions discussed above.

The Prize Winners and their Papers

In the twenty years since the Prize was established, nineteen paper Prizes have been awarded (there is no record of a Prize being awarded in 2012).Footnote ⁴ The papers that were recognized deal with varied topics: from economics, to election violence, to enamelware. Twelve of the nineteen Prize-winning papers were published in or are currently in press with ASR. Four of the seven papers not published in ASR appear to have been published elsewhere (one in the Journal of Modern African Studies, two in sub-disciplinary journals; and the last as part of a monograph). Three Prize-winning papers do not appear to have been published either as journal articles or book chapters.

We reviewed available online biographies to assess the demographics of the Prize winners, relying on pronoun choice as a proxy for gender identity (see Table 1). The gender of Prize winners appears to be roughly half female and half male. Only three of the nineteen explicitly identify roots (fully or partly) on the African continent. While this may indicate that gender equity has progressed in the field, equity in race, ethnicity, and nationality still lags.

Table 1.

Prizewinning papers since establishment of the award

We analyzed the institutional affiliations of the Prize winners (see Table 2) and found that fifteen of nineteen were PhD students or candidates at Research I institutions in the United States. Fourteen of these fifteen are also generally considered to be predominantly White institutions (PWIs).Footnote ⁵ Many of these institutions (University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Florida, Harvard University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, and UCLA) are or have been designated as Title VI institutions. The other four Prize winners were PhD students or candidates at elite European universities: Cambridge University (UK), Lund University (Sweden), and the University of Atwerp (Belgium). Significantly, none of the Prize-winners studied at HBCUs in the United States or at universities on the African continent—indicating that the Prize is still centered in predominantly White institutions of the United States and Europe.

Table 2.

Institutional affiliation of Prize winners

We were also interested to note whether Prize-winning papers tended to study certain parts of the continent or certain countries more than others (see Table 3). A total of five papers were centered on West African countries and contexts (Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, and Togo); nine papers related to Eastern and Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda); two focused on Southern African contexts in Angola and Zambia; and three included cross-national analysis. Significantly, none of the prize-winning papers focuses on northern Africa, reflecting perhaps what Guy C.Z. Mahone called “the contrived [Africanist] distinction between Africa south of the Sahara and North Africa” (1971, in Zeleza Reference Zeleza1997:197) rooted in colonial pasts that bifurcated sub-Saharan Africa from the rest of the continent, not only geographically but culturally and politically. Nor does any paper examine diasporic or trans-continental contexts—raising questions about the legacy of historical divisions in the ASA about what constitutes African Studies.

Table 3.

Geographic focus of prizewinning papers

The disciplinary orientation of Prize winners (see Table 4) was concentrated in two fields: History (7) and Political Science (6). Other disciplines represented were Anthropology (3), Geography (2), and interdisciplinary programs including Development Studies (1) and International Relations (1). Significantly, no Prize has been awarded to students in Economics, Sociology, Philosophy, or African Literature/Language. In future analysis, it would be worth exploring if and why students in the unrepresented disciplines are either less likely to present or less likely to submit their papers for consideration and/or if these trends reflect the constitution of Prize committees.

Table 4.

Primary disciplinary orientation of prizewinning papers

Prize winners have gone on to mainly academic careers in a range of institutional contexts, with most still conducting research related to the African continent (see Table 5). Three Prize winners are in the process of finishing their PhDs. Thirteen are teaching in tenure-track or equivalent academic positions in universities and colleges in the United States, Belgium, Canada, China, Netherlands, and Sweden.Footnote ⁶ All of these institutions could be termed “Traditionally White Institutions.” However, two Prize winners (Cheney and Ingelaere) teaching in Development Studies programs in Belgium and the Netherlands noted that nearly a third of their programs’ students were from the African continent. Six of these employed academics are already tenured, while seven are not yet tenured. One Prize winner maintains both university affiliation and a successful career beyond academia (with USAID). We were unable to confirm the employment status of two Prize winners.

Table 5.

Career trajectories of Prize winners

In sum, this analysis of Prize-winning papers points to the significance of the GSP Prize in recognizing and supporting early-career scholars conducting research in a variety of African contexts, who by and large continue to contribute to teaching and scholarship on Africa. But it also supports Robinson’s argument that although Prize winners themselves represent a diversity of identities, disciplines, and professional trajectories, the GSP Prize largely recognizes students from—and subsequently goes on to strengthen the faculty of—one particular world of African Studies: that is, the world of predominantly White institutions. It is important to note that the group of authors themselves represents some degree of racial, national, and ethnic diversity (though less than desired, to be sure). But the near-exclusive awarding of the Prize to PhD students at predominantly White institutions points to an ongoing hegemony in how African Studies is defined and delineated. We now turn to our conversations with the Prize winners themselves for insights into their own perceptions of the award and its social and professional work.

Eyes on the Prize: Toward a Reimagination of the Role of Awards in African Studies

While GSP Prize winners were grateful for the recognition winning the Prize afforded them, they were also well aware of how the historical structures and contemporary processes of the ASA may have advantaged them in certain ways. This led to a discussion of ways to re-think the Prize in order to address the historical, racial, and geographical inequities in the organization that continue to this day. The discussion is, of course, not new. In 1969, Nell Painter (herself a graduate student at the time) posed questions to President James Duffy at the ASA Annual Meetings in Montreal that resonated with the broad and growing discontent with the racial composition and dynamics of African Studies. She asked, “Have members asked why there are so few black people in the Association? Has the Association taken meaningful steps towards changing the conditions which keep most black students from reaching a level where they might even know of the existence of the African Studies Association?” Footnote ⁷ Examining the structure, history, context, and perceived effects of the GSP Prize allows us the opportunity to revisit Painter’s pointed questions. Even in our conversation with the winners, a sense of unease about whom this Prize was speaking to, on behalf of, and the scope of its claims were clearly communicated by a number of Prize winners, even as they expressed tremendous gratitude and extolled the rewards of the GSP Prize for their own personal career trajectories and the broadening of African Studies as a discipline.

It is important to note that despite its relatively short history, the institutional structure supporting the award has been dynamic, undergoing several changes in recent years to respond to ongoing conversations about equity, race, and decolonization in the ASA. First, although it was conventional to include a US-based African scholar on the GSP Prize selection committee, a recent policy change requires at least one Africa-based African scholar to serve on the committee. Second, the ASR editor has long served as a member of the committee, but that role was converted to a non-voting ex officio role in 2019, to moderate the role of the editor in the selection process and eliminate a possible bias toward rapid publishability versus other scholarly attributes. Third, criteria for the submitted paper were refined by requiring an article-length manuscript to be submitted. Prior to this shift, the pool of submitted papers might pit fifteen-minute talks against dissertation chapters against article manuscript drafts, with some forms more likely to be chosen than others. Finally, the guidelines of the GSP Prize were revised to acknowledge up to two runners-up in order to distribute recognition and its rewards more widely. Finally, while not a change to official GSP Prize policy, it is noteworthy that the ASR editor-in-chief and members of the Editorial Review Board have been conducting workshops with graduate students in a number of regional hubs on the African continent to discuss manuscript preparation and Prize submissions, and to generate more linkages between the journal and young scholars on the continent.

We laud these efforts, and in the spirit of these important recent revisions, we would like to propose some additional ideas for consideration, based on ideas articulated in our conversation with past Prize winners. Of particular concern is the way that the Prize itself intervenes in a professional reward structure that is itself constituted by seniority. As such, the Prize is not simply recognition for the internal merits of the paper and its author but is also a marker of good mentoring by a higher-status scholar, usually from an institution accorded higher status in the ASA—a field comprised mainly of predominantly White institutions.

One key issue to address is thus not only the quantity of submissions from which the committee can select a winner, but also the overall diversity of the institutions, demographics, and mentors that the overall pool represents. In this light, and given the expense of travel, we encourage the ASA to either decouple the GSP Prize from conference participation altogether or to require that submitted papers have been presented at one of a broader selection of conferences that include more diasporic perspectives and/or are held on the African continent. Institutionalizing hybrid conferences to allow for both remote (and low-cost) participation as well as face-to-face opportunities could also go a long way toward diversifying the applicant pool and the voices amplified by the Prize. We applaud and support ongoing engagement in concerted efforts to recruit paper presentations and GSP Prize submissions from graduate students at HBCUs and Africa-based universities. We also think the ASA should encourage and/or incentivize student papers to be co-written with (or among) continentally based, African researchers and research assistants.

But a larger question relates to the work that awards are doing, and the work we want them to do, in this larger field of scholarship on Africa. While we do not purport to know the answer to this question, we encourage ASA to develop a conversation with multiple scholarly associations of the diaspora and the African continent (e.g., AHSA, ASWAD, CODESRIA, even former ASA Prize winners) about potentially collaborating to select and mentor a diverse group of young scholars through paper presentation at an array of African Studies conferences, awards submission, and manuscript submission, and to build among these young scholars networks of communication, mutual support, and a more integrated world of African Studies for the next generation.

None of these actions is a magic bullet. Each could also serve to further reproduce and institutionalize inequalities by—as one reviewer of this article noted, for example—“poaching” promising students from continentally-based organizations. But, if carried out with transparency, dialogue, and an ongoing eye on the ultimate aim of decentering Whiteness and re-centering African and African-descended voices in African Studies, such restructuring of the GSP Prize could constitute important steps toward Shose Kessi, Zoe Marks, and Elelwani Ramugondo’s call in the opening epigraph to “open the walls of our institutions physically and epistemically,” to make our contributions “sharper, more just, and infinitely more rigorous in understanding and shaping the world” (Reference Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo2020:280).

As Paul Zeleza has so bluntly written, “If meaningful transatlantic intellectual conversations are to develop that do not replicate the earlier infamous exploitative slave triangle, all of us need to reflect more seriously and self-critically than we are often inclined to do on the integrity and impact of our scholarly production and positions” (Reference Zeleza1997:207). In this spirit, we end this introduction not with answers but with questions about the larger structure of awards in African Studies. What would it look like for awards to honor collaboration, and not individuation? How can we continue to renovate awards to result not just in consecration, but in communication, amplification, and redistribution? And how can we build awards that augment and incentivize dialogue and connection, rather than disconnection and segmentation, between the worlds of African Studies?