When Bates chose to explore the 1804 Haitian revolution as the theme for its 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance, the choice revealed much about the wide-angle view that faculty and students apply to African American and Caribbean experiences.

The Ford Foundation has recognized the quality of this interdisciplinary approach, awarding Bates and Associate Professor of Anthropology Charles Carnegie a three-year, $300,000 grant, "Diasporic Knowledges," to re-imagine how the joined fields of Caribbean and African American studies should be understood and taught.

Carnegie, a member of the editorial collective for the Caribbean studies journal Small Axe ("If you are the big tree, we are the small axe, ready to cut you down," sang reggae star Bob Marley, using a Jamaican proverb) and chair of the African American studies program at Bates, produces groundbreaking approaches to the study of the African diaspora.

Born and raised in Jamaica, where he headed the African Caribbean Institute from 1987 to 1991, Carnegie recently has focused on identity and on issues of nationalism and transnationalism. His latest book, Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (Rutgers University Press, 2002), examines new ways of approaching and creating world community that accommodate local histories, cultures and loyalties in a larger global framework.

African American studies is at a juncture where it's rethinking itself, much the way intellectuals and scholars in the black diaspora did in the early 1970s, Carnegie says. "By asking uncomfortable questions about who we are and what we are thinking, by bringing gender studies to the forefront, we can question our nationalist presumptions as well as our racial ones."