## Introduction: the Black studies movement, pan-Africanism, and cultural nationalism  
The black studies movement, inaugurated in the late 1960s by student and community-based demands for a 'more relevant education', represented the intellectual expression of political pan-Africanism in colleges and universities in the United States of America. According to St. Clair Drake, 'Pan-Africanism ha[d] provided a distinct global focus for Black Studies since the programs became a part of the campus scene in the late sixties and early seventies' (Drake, 1984, p. 236). Student agitation for a culturally legible education with utility beyond the so-called ivory tower fundamentally challenged the imperialist, white supremacist, and bourgeois logics of the traditional disciplines. These strivings emphasized economic development of local and global communities, black self-determination and racial equality, and the importance of an internationalist framework to connect African-descendant struggles for liberation in the global North and the global South.  
The pan-Africanist ethos undergirding black student militancy was manifested in the characterization of the students' struggles in terms of Third Worldism, with San Francisco State College leading the way by founding the Third World movement in 1968. Black students drew upon the anti-imperial,  
anti-colonial, and anti-racist insurgencies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the global decolonizing world more broadly as a metaphor and analogy for their position as an internal colony. Like pan-African movements for independence, sovereignty, and an equal position in the global community, the black student movement asserted itself as culturally and socially equal to the dominant power structure, and thus deserving of recognition, legitimacy, and academic representation of their realities.