"Black studies may be defined as an analysis of the factors and conditions which have affected the economic, psychological, legal and moral status of the African in America as well as the African in diaspora. Not only is Black Studies concentrated with the culture of the Afro-American ethnic, as historically and sociologically defined by the traditional literature, it is also concerned with the development of new approaches to the study of the Black experience and with the development of social policies which will impact positively upon the lives of black people." --Vivian Gordon, 1981

"Africana studies is the multidisciplinary analysis of the lives and thought of people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world. It embraces Africa, Afro America, and the Caribbean, but does not confine itself to those three geographical areas."--Robert L. Harris, Jr., 1990

"African American studies, broadly defined, is the systematic study of the black experience, framed by the socioeconomic, cultural, and geographical boundaries of sub-Saharan African and the black diaspora of North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Latin America, and increasingly Europe itself. At its core, it is also the black intellectual tradition as it has challenged and interacted with Western civilization and cultures. In the social sciences and humanities, that intellectual tradition has assumed a complex burden over many generations, seeking to engage in a critical dialogue with white scholarships on a range of complex issues, and most significantly, the definition and reality of race as a social construct, and the factors that explain the structures of inequality which, greatly define the existence of black people across the globe." --Manning Marable, 1995