Professor Reiland Rabaka

Our faculty are a source of great pride and bring a world of expertise, experimentation and excellence to our students and our community. Meet Reiland Rabaka, associate professor of Africana studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, affiliate professor of Women and Gender Studies and research fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA).

Rabaka's research interests include Africana philosophy, critical race theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, radical politics, critical social theory, critical pedagogy and liberation theology. He has published research in several well-known journals and is considered to be one of the leading Du Bois scholars of his generation. He is the author of two books, "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century: An Essay on Africana Critical Theory" and "Du Bois's Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory."

What drew you to your field of expertise, and keeps you passionate about your work?

I suppose I was drawn to Africana studies for several reasons. First and foremost, because I honestly believe that Africa – both continental and diasporan Africa – has a special truth to speak to the world, as with all other human cultures and civilizations. However, as a consequence of the African holocaust, enslavement, colonization, segregation and continued oppression, continental and diasporan Africans have been rudely and repeatedly blocked from making their own distinct contributions to modern human culture and civilization. Through my research and teaching I have discovered that all too often what people, including African Americans, know about Africa is actually a Eurocentric sociopolitical construction of Africa and not Africa on its own (anti-racist and anti-colonial) historical and cultural terms.

This brings me to the second reason I decided to devote my intellectual and political life to Africana studies: because Africana studies in its most comprehensive sense includes African, African American, Afro-American, Afro-Asian, Afro-European, Afro-Latino, Afro-Native American, Caribbean, Pan-African, Black British and, of course, Black studies. It seemed to me in undergrad and grad school that Africana studies allowed me to study the entire African world; it was the academic discipline that most aided me in understanding what the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka meant when he sternly stated, Africa does not stop "wherever salt water licks its shores." Absolutely not. Africa is wherever African people are, wherever they have adapted and re-created African culture and civilization. This really resonates with me, especially considering the fact that I have family scattered throughout the African world, some known, some unknown.

The final reason I was drawn to Africana studies has to do with my intense interests in a wide range of academic disciplines and my commitments to radical politics and democratic social transformation. In much of my work I have argued that Africana studies is a transdisciplinary discipline, that is, a discipline that transgresses, transverses, and transcends the academic boundaries, intellectual borders, the color-lines, racial chasms, and the jingoism and gender injustice of traditional single phenomenon-focused disciplines, owing to the fact that at its best it poses problems and seeks solutions on behalf of Africana (and other struggling) people employing the theoretic innovations of both the social sciences and humanities, as well as the political breakthroughs of grassroots radical and revolutionary social movements. In Africana studies I discovered a paradigm and point of departure for me to not simply challenge and change myself, but also to humbly transform others and the wider world. I continue to believe that the knowledge that we produce and share in the academy can and does impact the wider world. Africana studies compassionately offers continental and diapsoran Africans' solutions to humanity's most pressing social and political problems.

What do you most enjoy and what is the most challenging aspect of your profession?
What I enjoy most about being a professor of Africana studies is sharing continental and diasporan African culture with others. You see, for me being a professor is not simply about teaching; it is also about learning. I honestly believe that real professors do not simply teach their students but they actually open themselves to learning from their students, who in a very special sense become their teachers. For example, I have been teaching a course on hip-hop here for the last couple of years. My students, to be perfectly honest, probably taught me much more than I ever taught them about hip-hop. I mean, they live it each and every day, even out here high up in the Rocky Mountains. Indeed, they do.

Part of my job as a professor of Africana studies is to help them make connections from hip-hop to the Harlem Renaissance or the Blacks Arts Movement. What I seek to do is ground my students in the hidden Africana histories that are already all around them. I also want to empower them so that they know they, too have the power to make history. I tell them often throughout the semester: 'Don't just study history, make history.' This seems to really resonate with the hip-hop generation because they are already making history. I am only trying to get them to bring the dialectic to bear on their history-making and ask themselves critical questions concerning whether they are making positive or negative history. This is especially the case when it comes to the hip-hop generation's gender politics. So here I challenge them to study herstory (women's history) and I expose them to what Joan Morgan has dubbed "hip-hop feminism." My conception of critical pedagogy has been profoundly influenced by the African American radical feminist bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) and Teaching Communities: A Pedagogy of Hope (2004), and I take hooks very seriously when she writes that radical pedagogues must develop the ability to "translate ideas to an audience that varies in age, sex, ethnicity, [and] degree of literacy." As a professor of Africana studies my ongoing critical pedagogical goal is to teach and learn across the boundaries of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and nations.

I see myself, in the tradition of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, as a bridge builder and a way maker. I am both professionally and personally committed to border-crossing, boundary-breaking, and way-making. This, as you might imagine, is a serious challenge because so often my students have deep-seated preconceived notions of who continental and diasporan Africans are and, therefore, what Africana studies is or, to their minds, should be about. I, of course, critically challenge them to see that Africana studies is not simply about studying race and ethnicity, but also about studying gender, class, sexual orientation and a whole host of other extremely important issues.  

What are your favorite interests and activities apart from your work?

I often joke with my family and friends about the lack-luster life I lead away from the lectern. I was once a professional jazz drummer and have a collection of more than 3,000 jazz albums. Listening to jazz and other kinds of music is an ongoing interest, if not an ever-percolating passion of mine. I also enjoy the theater and museums. I am a long distance cyclist and regularly hike. I love traveling and have had the opportunity to travel extensively internationally as a jazz musician but more so as a researcher. I spend lots of time in old dank and dusty archives and love to browse used book stores. I read between two to three books a week and it is, without a doubt, my favorite pastime. I am a published poet and love to read and write poetry. I know, I know, pretty boring, but its what I enjoy. I have reached a point in my life where I am consciously attempting to cultivate new interests and experience new things, so if I am asked this same question three months from now I will more than likely have a different set of answers. I think listening to all that jazz has indelibly influenced me to embrace improvisation and spontaneity. Jazz sort of provides the soundtrack to my life, and keep in mind, we have a form of jazz for every mood and seemingly every lived experience, every life situation.    

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