In this article I draw on Stuart Hall’s extensive writing on blackness generally, touch on the few instances of him directly addressing Africa and continental African blackness and on what Gayatri Spivak rightly sees as the missed articulation of Africa(ns) and the postcolonial cultural studies project in Hall’s work in order to undertake, à la Hall’s essay on Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, a brief exercise on Hall’s relevance for the study of continental African blackness. The premise of my arguments is that Hall’s insistence on the importance of both difference and complexity should give us pause about the neat dualism of hybrid, evolving diasporic blackness and originary fixed continental blackness on the one hand and the assumptions of a spatio-temporally seamless homogeneous blackness from the continent to the far reaches of the diaspora on the other. Africa in general, and African blackness in particular, I argue, are in fact rather complex and this ought to be taken up more seriously and rigorously in conceptualizations of blackness and the field of cultural studies. Continued failure to do so, I conclude, has potentially serious consequences for the politics of representation and beyond.

This essay addresses the topic of the state of qualitative research in education by asserting that qualitative research in education is in quite a state. Drawing heavily on Denzin and Lincoln’s periodization of qualitative research as a guide, it outlines the various competing developments from within and outside that are vying to characterize the current moment and illustrates the difficulty of pinpointing the moment. Arguing for a conception of overlapping moments rather than a neat historical progression, the essay posits that the current period is simultaneously one of overt politicization, epistemological and paradigmatic proliferation, post‐posts (post‐postmodernism, post‐poststructuralism, post‐experimentation) and a new post (postcolonialism), as well as a new or renewed paradigm war. The conclusion drawn is that the current/next moment in qualitative research in education is one of methodological contestation, one that demands either complicity with or resistance to the government‐sanctioned resurgence of the hegemony of positivism.

In this essay we draw on close to 100 journal essays and books to produce a necessarily partial and subjective survey of contemporary African cultural studies. Any such survey ought to take into account the politics of representation broadly conceptualized and in this case representation largely constitutes the survey. We made choices about identities and identification, space and place and the confluence of these factors in the articulation of African cultural studies. In terms of identity, we take up Blackness as the hegemonic (and hence not exclusive) racial identity and identification of African cultural studies and address gender and sexuality issues specifically through the exposition of African feminisms, womanisms and queer thought and politics. In terms of spatiality we take a stance on the exclusive continental versus continuity conception Africa: we treat the African diaspora as contributory and its relationship to the continent as a problematic, while taking up continental Africa as the principal location of African cultural studies. On the continent we address the principal themes that characterize West, East, North and Southern African cultural studies. We identify journals, programs of study and the work of academics and cultural workers on the continent and in the diaspora as contributory to the articulation and disciplining of African cultural studies. African cultural studies in sum is an articulation that holds in tension Afropolitanism and Afropessimism, exclusive regional constituted continental and Black Atlantic, Pan-African, Afrocentric continental plus diasporic conception; beyond specifically African conceptions of gender, queer identity and identification are emergent as particularly important. African cultural studies is both a viable alternative to African area studies and an underrepresented, even largely ignored potential contributory discourse to global(ized) cultural studies.

Internationally a plethora of narratives within, beside and in opposition to multiculturalism has necessitated the rethinking of some key questions. Is multiculturalism apt for equitable representation? Can multiculturalism remain the hegemonic discourse and policy of diversity or is it destined to be supplanted? In this essay, we reconsider multiculturalism’s changing currency and pedagogical potential, contextualized in the global multicultural city of Sydney, Australia. Our qualitative research is grounded in the voices and knowledge of “new youth,” who self-identify as immigrant, multiracial, and/or queer – (post)multicultural signifiers that are non-Indigenous and yet significantly differing from the previously taken for granted Eurocentric white heterosexual representations of the Australian nation. Through our in-depth interviews with these new youth – who are also activist community workers – we learned how they affectively make sense of multiculturalism and community. They are emotionally divested from multiculturalism that tinkers with ethnoracial categories/differences yet leave the structures of whiteness both opaque and intact. On the other hand, they see some value in but are ambivalent about multiculturalism’s potential to make a difference to community work, struggles for justice, and their own identities and senses of belonging. Our findings, which have implications for diversity and social justice education, indicate the emergence of post-multicultural and/or alternative, complex articulations of diversity and belonging that unsettle fixed identity categories and conceptions of the nation and belonging and indeed multiculturalism itself.

This unconventional essay is the (slightly modified) transcript of the question‐and‐answer period of an AERA conference session on the topic of paradigm proliferation. Through responses to the discussant’s prepared questions and audience members’ comments and questions, each panelist extends and defends the ideas put forward in her or his paper and responds to the issues raised from the perspectives of the other panelists that go against the grain of their own positions. The result is a dialogical, multi‐voiced text involving three panelists, a discussant and members of the audience. The text provides a vicarious glimpse into one instance of a group’s dynamic engagement of the topic of paradigm proliferation.

This essay poses and attempts to answer the central question: ‘What does African Cultural Studies do?’ It takes an autobiographical approach to address the genealogy, status quo and the potential future of the floating signifier that is African Cultural Studies. It unpacks and multiplies African Cultural Studies and contextualises it as a form of African studies and as both interventionist in and contributory to transnational cultural studies. African Cultural Studies’ marginality in the global discourse is rearticulated as both a positioning of disempowerment on the one hand and one of generative and insurgent politics on the other. Stressing the need for continental and diasporic Africans to self-identify issues to be addressed (in place of Eurocentric, imposed preoccupations), the essay identifies as examples the always already complex nature of identity and belonging (and the irony of emergent xenophobia); continental and diasporic relations that trouble the taken-for-grantedness of what constitutes Africa(ns), and queer Africa in the face of institutionalised homophobia. Whether local nativist or globally engaged approaches are taken, the essay concludes that African Cultural Studies ought to be self-reflexively dedicated not only to doing Cultural Studies but to what the doing of African Cultural Studies does for Africa(ns) and for Transnational Cultural Studies.