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Africanists in the United States African Studies Association have been so relatively successful in establishing interdisciplinary communication and co-operation that Euro pean scholars have been considering setting up similar organi zations. As the latest area field to emerge in the United States, African studies have benefited from the experiences of other area programs. Also, the notion that area studies might be substitutes for the traditional university depart ments had subsided by the time that African studies centers began to proliferate. The African Studies Association is prob ably unique in its lack of research or policy-directing aspects, and its small size relative to the other professional associations has allowed Africanists to get to know each other according to particular interests in African regions or problems, rather than along disciplinary lines alone. The problem of co-ordina tion between linguists and nonlinguists was ameliorated because descriptive linguistics, the variety of most interest to African ists, has been considered to be a subfield of anthropology in most major departments—although a shortage of linguists with an African background has hampered the expansion of the teaching of African languages. The many disciplines required for studying African history may open the way for further interdisciplinary efforts.

African Studies is characterised by intellectual contestations and epistemic struggles. These have become accentuated in the context of the current resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. This article delineates and reflects on 10 challenges confronting reconfiguring African Studies, namely genealogical, epistemic, linguistic, chronological, theoretical, spatial (area studies, country studies), androcentric, disciplinary, canonical issues and resilience of colonial library. These challenges are posed as part of comfort zones (asserted and reasserted truth/common notions) in doing African Studies that have to be changed in accordance with demands for a decolonised African Studies.

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field.

Examines the work of Ruth First, an exiled political activist committed to socialism & the liberation of Africa, who found it difficult to establish a career as a mainstream journalist. Instead, she wrote a series of books for the Penguin Africa Library, lectured in sociology at the U of Durham (England), & served as research director at the Centre for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane U (Maputo, Mozambique). First was one of the few writers to focus her attention on the whole of Africa & its people, not just the liberation of South Africa. She was assassinated by a letter bomb in 1982. 53 References. M. Maguire

This second volume of the African Studies Forum Series at the University of South Africa presents a collection of eleven articles written in both English and Afrikaans which cover different aspects of South Africa's political culture. Thus, the focus is on such different features as the Freedom Charter, African political mobilisations in Brakpan in the 1950s and the extra-parliamentary opposition in the mid-1980s, but also on theatre, socio-linguistics (Afrikaans and Xhosa), literature and music. (DÜI-Eng)

Contents. - Hollander, J. H. Introduction. - Barnett, G. E. The government of the Typographical union. - Glocker, T. W. The structure of the Cigar makers' union. - Sakolski, A. M. The finances of the Iron molders' union. - Buckler, W. H. The minimum wage in the Machinists' union. - Barnett, G. E. Collective bargaining in the Typographical union. - Hilbert, F. W. Employers' associations in the United States. - Hilbert, F. W. Trade-union agreements in the Iron molders' union. - Motley, J. M Apprenticeship in the building trades. - Blum, S. Trade-union rules in the building trades. -Kennedy, J. B. The beneficiary features of the railway unions. - Kirk, W. The Knights of labor and the American federation of labor. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The letter above capsules the problems and opportunities of African studies in the mid-1970s. It suggests that American education about Africa is pitifully inadequate, and that it has a long way to go to achieve the objective of a citizenry informed about Africa and one which accepts and appreciates Africa as well as the range of cultures which comprise our modern global society.