The Howard School of African Diaspora Studies

• In Event: The Howard School of International Affairs: Theory and Practice

Abstract

This essay builds on recent studies of racism in the foundational scholarship in IR and its implications for empirical theory and extends it to the subfield of Diaspora Studies. Taking as its point of departure, Vitalis’ (2015) thesis on the Howard School of IR, it briefly reviews a strain of empirical theory of Howard School scholars, Du Bois’ and Locke, which focused on major racial diasporas during the first half of the twentieth century, and scholars associated with the Howard School of African Diaspora Studies during the second half, which has been marginalized in mainstream Diaspora Studies and develop their argument on the impact of major racial diasporas in world politics and discuss their implications for IR theory. Their pan-Africanist diasporist IR theory, inter alia, reinforces the salience of racial reparations as a major unresolved issue of social justice but its usefulness for empirical IR theory may be undermined by the emergent properties of diasporas as an empirical phenomenon and the unsuitability of constructs such as race for cross- national and cross-temporal analysis, which are hallmarks of IR. Ironically, the Howard School’s promulgation of empirical theory aimed at addressing the concrete depredations of the white supremacist global system and the provision of reparations for those subjected to it ultimately demonstrates the limits of systematic analyses of empirical IR theory.

Author

• Errol A. Henderson, Pennsylvania State University