Street Fatigues

Temple: The Black Canon

With 1,150 students enrolled this semester, black studies is one of the more popular departments at Temple, a sprawling public university in Philadelphia of 30,000 students, 25 percent of whom are African-American.

Attend an undergraduate class like ''Hip-Hop and Black Culture'' and it is easy to see why. Taught by Nathaniel Thompson, a dynamic young visiting professor, the course promises to ''engage hip-hop not as a mode of entertainment, but as a medium of communications which impacts, represents and misrepresents the life experience of African people in the United States,'' according to the syllabus.

His hair set in neat cornrows, Mr. Thompson wears a black, hooded sweatshirt and baggy black jeans. ''I'm not of the school that believes hip-hop is a culture,'' he announces. He then proceeds to analyze the genre using Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric categories, as described in his book ''Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge'': Does it have a cosmology, axiology (value system), epistemology or aesthetic? When the discussion gets too abstract, he brings it down to earth with a seemingly simple question: ''Am I dressed hip-hop today?'' This leads to a heated debate about the relation between the designer Ralph Lauren and black culture, and ends with the class dissecting the oft-used phrase ''Keeping it real.'' One woman asks, ''What is the 'it' that is always being kept real, anyway?''

Temple's African-American studies department, which was founded in 1969, was the first to offer a black studies Ph.D., in 1988. Its fame emanates from Dr. Asante, the graduate program's founder and the chief theorist of Afrocentricity. As defined in his 1980 book of the same title, Afrocentricity is ''interpretation and analysis from the perspective of African people as subjects rather than as objects on the fringes of the European experience.''

Nathaniel Norment Jr., the department's current chairman, underscores the relationship between the theory and mainstream scholarship: ''Ninety-five percent of the research done on African-Americans has been done by whites, and 95 percent of it has been negative,'' he says. ''From 'The Moynihan Report' to 'The Bell Curve,' African-American people have been portrayed as subhuman and inferior. Through Afrocentricity and African-centeredness, African-American studies can act as a corrective to this bias.''

By Robert S. Boynton

Published: Sunday, April 14, 2002