Minkah Makalani ventures beyond what can be imagined

Minkah Makalani - The new director of the interdisciplinary Johns Hopkins Center for Africana Studies has seen firsthand how collaboration between the academy and the community can yield ideas unfettered by preconceived notions and expectations A fter historian Minkah Makalani finished writing his first book, he returned to London to explore some materials he'd stumbled across during his research there, planning to write an article about them. But when he brought his findings back to work on them in his African and African Diaspora Studies department at the University of Texas, his colleagues encouraged him to take the work in unplanned directions. The result is a book in progress about Trinidadian intellectual anticolonial activist C.L.R. James, which he says would likely not have happened in a different environment. "They pushed me precisely at the point when I started to read more political theory," Makalani says of his colleagues. "I realized I had to do a whole lot more political theory, because I had to understand where James was coming from. "Black Studies was an environment that explicitly thrived on not merely asking the questions that are appropriate to your discipline and your training, but asking the kinds of questions that are appropriate to the problem you're trying to understand, and that was a different kind of orientation.