In 1963, the first course in Black Studies entitled “Negro History” was established at Merriet Junior College in Oakland, California, and shortly afterwards, the first Black Studies program was launched at San Francisco State College. This program preceded by a few years a first Black Studies department at the same institution, which was soon imitated first at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and then in nearly 500 academic units that were propelled between 1968 and 1975.

The decade of the 1980s then saw the negotiation of the place of Black Studies in institutions that were not necessarily welcoming to it, and the turn of the 2000s saw the solidification of the theoretical, institutional and political posture of Black Studies, which was now well established. In the end, it was mainly during the 2010s that such programs began to appear more widely outside the United States. In the United Kingdom, for example, it was not until 2017 that an undergraduate degree in Black Studies was created. In Canada, it was in 2016 that the first Black Studies program was established at Dalhousie University, seven years after the creation of the Black Canadian Studies Association, and just before such spaces multiplied elsewhere in the country. While such programs and university units have been slow to emerge in many contexts, including Canada, even though calls for their creation have been heard since the 1960s, the last few years have seen them take off.

On the other hand, in French-speaking countries, more so than in Portuguese- or Spanish-speaking countries, these programs and institutional spaces do not exist, despite the vitality of research, and discussions in this area are still barely audible in universities. What explains this discrepancy? The colloquium proposes to explore (1) epistemological formations across the different linguistic locations and spaces of the black diaspora, (2) the institutional and political trajectories of black knowledge and methodologies in universities, and (3) the political, social and cultural impacts and challenges of the presence or absence of black studies.