The answer that Baker and other academics came up with was literary criticism--a decision that has made a great impact on defining Afro-American studies.

"There has definitely been a shift from a predominant concern with history in Afro-American studies that peaked in the 1970s with several prize-winning books," says Harvard's Afro-Am Department Chair Werner Sollors.

Those books "represented a big assault on the previous historiography," Sollors says, although he conjectures that the influential history texts may have had the "funny effect" of silencing important historical works by other Afro-American scholars.

Sollors adds that up through the Civil Rights movement "so many energies were tied up in simply fighting segregation" that scholars didn't really have the chance to explore the complexities of the Afro-American literary tradition. "But now that the dust from that has settled a little bit, the texts are being recuperated in a new way," he says. "That's not to say there isn't a political agenda still, but rather that different questions can now be asked."

And as the historians reached the end of their era of domination within the discipline, interest in literature burgeoned with the emergence of Black women writers and new methods of literary criticism, many scholars say.

"The conjunction of the women's movement and the prominence of Black women writers provided a very powerful source of interest," Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Barbara E. Johnson says. "People who were trained in literary theory have become interested in questioning the authority of the establishment."

Gates argues that the trend towards literature in Black studies stemmed in part from the publication of novels by Black women in the mid-1970s, just the time when Afro-American Studies departments were in a period of crisis.

"Women's studies and the feminist movement in general were very influential on the growth of Black Studies," says Gates. "Where the disciplines meet is on the terrain of Black women's studies. When people were starting to say that Afro-American studies was going to die, what kept it from dying was the infusion of Black women's literature."

But at the same time that the scholarship in the field has been changing, most professors say that the demographics of the profession have also affected the new literary scholarship. "The English profession was really in a slump in the 70s," Sollors says. "But today more people in general are drawn to literary orientations."

In general, English departments are witnessing higher undergraduate and graduate enrollments today than they did in the 1970s, while History departments have not been as attractive to young scholars, Gates says.

Yet some professors caution that the shift from history to literature may move Afro-American studies away from the political agenda that created such departments in the first place, thereby making them too esoteric.

Baker and Gates counter such charges, however, arguing that their work still involves the formation of clear political agendas. "I think that any scholarship that does not look to immediate social problems is not worth the paper it is written on," says Baker.

But he recognizes that by moving Afro-American studies to the theoretical realm of literary criticism, scholars risk undermining their own political projects. "What kind of coalition is it when [your scholarship] takes you out of contact with 95 percent of my people in this country?" Baker asks.

The line between being theoretical and being relevant is a thin one, and scholars say Baker and Gates are part of a new generation of Black academics whose own experience makes them suited to discern just what the line is.

As a group, these new Black literary theorists went to first-rate colleges or graduate schools in the formative period of Afro-American Studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They are familiar with both the practical politics of the Civil Rights movement and the rarefied academic politics of the university.