As a kick-off to the Black History Month celebration, a documentary featuring the founder of Northwestern’s Program of African Studies, Melville J. Herskovits, will premier nationally on the PBS series ‘Independent Lens’ Tuesday night at 10:30 p.m.
‘Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness’ focuses on Herskovits’ life and career. He founded the first department of African studies in America at NU in 1948 in an effort to establish African history and promote cultural self-awareness, said David Easterbrook, curator at NU’s Herskovits Library.
The documentary is not meant to be an honorary biography, said Llewellyn Smith, one of the documentary’s filmmakers. The documentary examines Herskovits’ work as a Jewish-American anthropologist who contributed ground-breaking work in African studies, he said.
‘What it’s really meant to explore is the meaning of the legacy of the work of someone like Herskovits,’ he said.
After working on the film for five years, Smith said he incorporated unusual visuals and sharp imagery to target a young audience, mainly college students. NU provided important information and rare video footage of Herskovits featured in the film, Smith said.
As part of the 60th Anniversary of the Program of African Studies, NU organized a special preview of the documentary at Block Cinema last February, said Kate Dargis, assistant director for the Program of African Studies.
‘The documentary is a significant contribution to raising awareness about Herskovits,’ Easterbrook said. ‘It raises as many questions as it answers in the film, which I think is exactly how it should be.’
In his work at NU, Herskovits focused primarily on expanding literature on Africa and relating African Studies to all academic disciplines, Easterbrook said. Herskovits had a keen focus on creating a library with a wide range of materials on Africa and African history on campus, he said. The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies opened as a separate library in 1954.
‘He was very firm in his claim for African studies at Northwestern, that the program be interdisciplinary in its approach,’ Easterbrook said.
Earlier this year, U.S. News & World Report ranked NU’s graduate program in African History No. 1. Easterbrook said there is a profound interest in African studies at NU because of the comprehensiveness of the Herskovits library and the increased number of faculty and graduate research opportunities.
Since its establishment, the program has grown significantly, with increases in the number of undergraduate course offerings and the number of affiliated faculty, Dargis said. Last fall the Program of African Studies introduced African studies as an adjunct major, which attracted roughly 20 more students to the program, she said.
Even though there is a strong interest in African studies nationwide, Herskovits’ makes NU stand out, Dargis said.
‘At Northwestern we have the program and the Herskovits Africana Library, which is the largest and one of the only libraries of its kind,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of strengths at NU coming from the fact that Herskovits taught here, and that’s the base that people are drawn to.’ [email protected]
