Africans and Asians: Historiography and the long view of global interaction

Journal of World History

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-30

  Keita, Maghan ^a  

^a VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HEGEMONY; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS;

AFRICA; ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; WORLD;

EID: 22144483813     PISSN: 10456007     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2005.0138     Document Type: Article

References (160)

1. Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg, eds., "Preface," in The African Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. vii.
2. George Shepperson, "Introduction," in The African Diaspora, p. 1.
3. Al-Baladhuri (ed. Muhammad Hamidullah), 1: 505.
4. Cited in Bernard Lewis, "The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam," in The African Diaspora, p. 44.
5. T. Walter Wallbank, Alistair M. Taylor, and Nels M. Bailkey, eds., Civilization Past & Present, Vol. I (Glenview, III.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1976), p. 96.
6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
8. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
9. Maghan Keita, "Deconstructing the Classical Age: Africa and the Unity of the Mediterranean World," Journal of Negro History 74.2 (Spring 1994): 149, 159.
10. Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 15-26, 41-151.
11. Maghan Keita, "Race, the Writing of History, and Culture Wars," Journal of Black Studies 33.2 (November 2002).
12. C. F. Volney, The Ruins: Or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires: And the Law of Nature (1802; reprint, New York: Peter Eckler, 1926),
13. quoted in Dickson Bruce Jr., "Ancient Africa and Early Black American Historians, 1883-1915," American Quarterly 36 (Winter 1984): 689.
14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (1946; rev. and enl. ed., New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 118.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and the Sociology of the Negro Race (1939; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 25. It should also be noted that Du Bois was quite intent on tracing an African presence in and interaction with Asia.
16. Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1970).
17. Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776, Evangeline Walker Andrews, ed., in collaboration with Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).
18. Samuel Morton, Crania Americana (1839).
19. George B. Glidden, Types of Mankind (1840). J. C. Nott was responsible for adapting and translating Arthur de Gobineau's work for American consumption.
20. Also see Gloria Horsley-Meacham, "Bull of the Nile: Symbol, History, and Racial Myth in 'Benito Cereno,'" New England Quarterly 64.2 (1991): 236-237.
21. Michael D. Biddiss, "Gobineau and the Origins of European Racism," Race 7.3 (January 1966): 264.
22. David Walker, "Appeal," in The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, ed. Sterling Stuckey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
23. Frederick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," in Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 227-235.
24. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Tayler Lewis, Theodore Dwight, et al., The People of Africa (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1871).
25. George Washington Williams, The History of the Negro Race in America (1883). There was also the significant body of work that emanated from the hierarchy to the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
26. Also see Keita, Race and the Writing of History, pp. 27-50, 75.
27. Chiekh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality [Antériorité des civilisations nègres. English. Selections] (New York: L. Hill, 1974).
28. Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States [Afrique noire pré-coloniale. English] (Westport, Conn.: L. Hill, ca. 1987).
29. Alain Bourgeois, La Grèce antique devant la négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine).
30. Jacques Maquet, Africanity, the Cultural Unity of Black Africa.
31. Also see Ali Mazrui, Africanity Redefined (2000);
32. Martin Bernal, Black Athena;
33. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1988).
34. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: J. Currey, 1994).
35. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (1989).
36. Immanuel Wallerstein, "World System versus World-Systems," in The World System, ed. Frank and Gills (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 292-296.
37. Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa and the Modern World (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1986).
38. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, "Rejoinder and Conclusions", in The World System, pp. 297-307.
39. Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
40. Frank's subtitle is "Global Economy in the Asian Age." In light of Frank's most recent work, ReORIENT, and his criticism of Philip Curtin in 1991, all of this becomes that much more interesting. Remarking on Curtin's Cross-Cultural Trade, Frank stated: "Curtin ... has not sought to pursue the African connection in Afro-Asia as far back in history as it may deserve."
41. Andre Gunder Frank, "A Plea for World System History," Journal of World History 2.1 (Spring 1991): 8.
42. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
43. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
44. Frank M. Snowden, "Ethiopians and the Graeco-Roman World," in The African Diaspora, ed. Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
45. Lewis, "The African Diaspora." Adele Simmons, "Class or Communalism? A Study of the Politics of Creoles in Mauritius," in The African Diaspora.
46. Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970).
47. Frank M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
48. William Leo Hansberry, "Ancient Kush, Old Aethiopia, and the Balad [sic] es Sudan," Journal of Human Relations 8 (1960).
49. Pillars in Ethiopian History: The William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook, Vol. I, ed. Joseph Harris (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
50. Africa and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers: The William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook, Vol. II, ed. Joseph Harris (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981).
51. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
52. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
53. William H. McNeill, "The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years," The Journal of World History 1.1 (1990).
54. Keita, "Deconstructing the Classical Age."
55. Herbert G. May and Bruce Metzger, eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
56. Josephus Flavius, "The Antiquities of the Jews," in The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987).
57. Henry T. Aubin, The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 B.C. (New York: Soho Press, 2002).
58. Keita, "Deconstructing the Classical Age."
59. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Exodus 2:16-22, 18:1-12; Numbers 12:1-16.
60. Josephus Flavius, "The Antiquities of the Jews," pp. 69-70, 69 n. a.
61. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 146, 149-150, 167.
62. Diodorus Siculus, Antiquities of Egypt, trans. Edwin Murphy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1989).
63. Also see Diodorus quoted in Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited (Trenton: African World Press, 1991), pp. 61-62.
64. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2: 321; 22: 295.
65. Edith Sanders, "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origins and Functions in Time Perspective," Journal of African History 10.5 (1969): 525.
66. Snowden, Blacks, pp. 105, 109.
67. Homer, The Illiad, trans. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Meyers (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 13.
68. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1970), p. 11.
69. Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy, trans. Arthur S. Way (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 77.
70. Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. Patric Dickinson (New York: New American Library, 1961).
71. Pliny, Natural History. These are listed by way of illustration. See Snowden for a much more extensive and comprehensive compilation.
72. R. Bosworth Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 19.
73. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
74. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now (1939; reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1993), pp. 6, 39.
75. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (1946; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1969), pp. 136, 141-142.
76. B. H. Warmington, Carthage (Robert Hale Limited, 1960), pp. 16, 32.
77. Gilbert Charles Picard and Colette Picard, Daily Life in Carthage, trans. by A. E. Foster (New York: McMillan Company, 1961).
78. Gilbert Charles Picard and Colette Picard, Life and Death in Carthage, trans. Dominique Collon (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1969).
79. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origins of Civilization, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1974), pp. 70, 118-119, 122.
80. Alain Bourgeois, La Grece Antique devant la Negritude (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1971), pp. 14-19.
81. Snowden, Blacks, pp. 2, 124-125.
82. Valentine Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988).
83. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994).
84. Keita, "Deconstructing the Classical Age," pp. 153-156.
85. Herodotus, The Histories, p. 486. Emphasis added.
86. Snowden, Blacks, pp. 123-124.
87. Ibid., pp. 151-153.
88. Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy, p. 71.
89. William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago and London: University of London Press, 1986), pp. 1-22.
90. Picard, Daily Life in Carthage and Life and Death in Carthage.
91. Keita, "Deconstructing the Classical Age," pp. 153-156.
92. Sanders, "Hamitic Hypothesis," p. 525.
93. Jesse Benjamin, "Of Nubians and Nabateans: Implications of Research on Neglected Dimensions of Ancient World History," in Conceptualizing/ Re-Conceptualizing Africa: The Construction of African Historical Identity, ed. Maghan Keita (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 31-52.
94. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 63.
95. Benjamin, "Of Nubians and Nabateans," pp. 31-32, 47-48.
96. Emphasis added. Cosmas enunciates the themes of the Classical Era that were made most familiar by Herodotus and implied in mythic literature by authors such as Homer, Vergil, and Quintus, and then links them in a Judeo-Christian motif: the Afro-Asian interaction that characterized their time and space. The river Phison separates all the countries of India [lying along its course] from the country of the Huns. In scripture the Indian region is call Euilat (Havilah). For it is thus written in Genesis: Now the river goeth Out from Eden to water Paradise. From there it was parted and became four heads. The name of the first is Phison (Pishon); that is which compasseth the whole land of Euliat, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; there is the carbuncle and the jasper stone; [Genesis 2:10-12] where the writer clearly calls the country Euliat. The Euliat, moreover, is of the race of Ham. For thus it is written: The sons of Ham, Cush and Misraim, Phut and Canaan the sons of Cush, Saba and Euliat; that is the Homerites and the Indians, for Saba is situated in the Homerite country, and Euliat is in India.
97. Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography, trans. J. W. McCrindle (ca. 525 C.E.; New York: Burt Franklin, 1897), pp. 365, 372-373.
98. Stanley Burstein, ed., Ancient African Civilizations: Kush and Axum (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998), pp. 83-86.
99. Philip Snow, Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 3.
100. Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography, pp. 368-370, 371-372.
101. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 36.
102. Andre Gunder Frank, Re-ORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
103. Also see Maghan Keita, "Africa and the Construction of a Grand Narrative in World History," in Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 289-293.
104. Neville Chittick, "The Coast before the Arrival of the Portuguese," in Zamani: A Survey of East African History, ed. B. A. Ogot and J. A. Kieran (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), pp. 103-110.
105. B. G. McIntosh, "The Eastern Bantu Peoples," in Zamani, pp. 199-200.
106. Snow, Star Raft, pp. xiv, 2-19.
107. Samuel M. Wilson, The Emperor's Giraffe and Other Stories of Cultural Contact (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), p. 124.
108. Du Bois, The World and Africa, pp. 176-200.
109. J. A. Rogers, Sex and Race (1952; reprint, St. Petersburg, Fla.: Helga Rogers, 1968).
110. Jan Van Sertima, ed., African Presence in Early Asia (New Brunswick: Transaction Publications, 1988).
111. Earl E. Thorpe, Black Historians: A Critique (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1971).
112. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
113. Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg, eds., Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
114. Keita, Race and the Writing of History.
115. Keita, "Race, the Writing of History, and Culture Wars."
116. Keita, "Grand Narrative."
117. Du Bois, World and Africa, pp. 176-181.
118. Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts in Pre-Modern Times (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
119. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony.
120. Jerry Bentley, personal correspondence with the author, 3 February 1999. Bentley writes, "There were definitely some African connections that I missed when writing Old World Encounters. Some things I have become aware of in the meantime and have tried to incorporate into more recent works."
121. Mike Edwards, "The Adventures of Marco Polo, Part I," National Geographic 201 (May 2001): 19. Interestingly enough, in 1991 National Geographic examined the itinerary of a contemporary of Marco Polo whose travels revealed much the same information concerning the relations between Africa and Asia during the Middle Ages and the approaching Renaissance. "Ibn Battuta, Prince of Travelers," by Thomas J. Abercrombie, like the Marco Polo piece, is accompanied by visual images that must be, in the least, arresting because of what they suggest and the historical legacy they report. At the very least they suggest, that on this issue - the longue durée of African and Asian interaction - these two texts, read together, provide a sound place from which to begin such an inquiry for the medieval and Renaissance periods. National Geographic 191 (December 1991): 2-49.
122. Jewsiewicki's comments on a "speculative philosophy of history" were made in relation to his analysis of the work of Cheikh Anta Diop. What becomes as interesting here, in relation to the remarks of both al-Baladhuri and al-Jahiz, is Diop's argument in much of his work of the African presence in "Asian" space, e.g., Mesopotamia. This, of course has been a peripheral argument of the Nile Valley school, of which Theophile Obenga, Van Sertima, and Jacob Carruthers are prime advocates. See Bernal, Black Athena;
123. Keita, Race and the Writing of History.
124. Jahiz, "Superiority of Blacks to Whites," in The Life and Works of Jahiz, ed. Charles Pella (Berkeley, Calif.: 1969), p. 196.
125. The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Folio Society, 1958), p. 35.
126. Cited in Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, p. 165.
127. Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of the African Slaves in the 3rd/9th Century (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Press, 1999), pp. 9, 14.
128. William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman, eds., The Islamic World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 353.
129. E. Ann McDougal, "The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade and Social Change from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century," Journal of African History 26 (1985): 8-13, 26.
130. Lamont D. King, "State and Ethnicity in Precolonial Nigeria," in Conceptualizing/Re-Conceptualizing Africa. Benjamin, "Nubians and Nabateans."
131. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. and trans. Manuel Komroff (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
132. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. and trans. Manuel Komroff (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1935).
133. John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
134. John Critchley, Marco Polo's Book (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK and Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1992).
135. Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1991), pp. 148-162.
136. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. Andre Lefevere (New York: Continuum, 1991).
137. Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba's Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
138. The Oxford English Dictionary, Concise Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 1846, 2639. Hans Debrunner is also helpful here in stipulating Moor and Saracen as synonymous cultural concepts in which some of the members are indeed black.
139. Power and Prestige: Africans in Europe (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979), pp. 18-19, 22.
140. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1832), pp. 39-41.
141. Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pp. 12-13.
142. Also see al-Idrisi, "Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq," in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, ed. N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 104-131.
143. Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, p. 13.
144. See also Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and trans. A. Asher (London: 1840) in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, pp. 135-136.
145. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
146. John Hunwick, Shari'a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad (New York: British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 3-28.
147. For this period, the "cusp" of the modern age, Songhay represents the forward edge of the African states and their continued interaction with the East - "Asia," as it were. Of course, one of the crucial elements that sparked the European age of discovery was the fabled pilgrimage - the hajj - of Musa, the Mansa, or emperor of Mali, in the early fourteenth century C.E., the stuff of legend and history.
148. Snow, Star Raft, p. 1.
149. Wilson, The Emperor's Giraffe, pp. 121-126.
150. Snow, Star Raft, pp. 3-13.
151. Ibid., pp. 16-19, 40.
152. I b i d.
153. Ibid., pp. 19-21.
154. Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, trans. and ed. Said Hamdun and Noel King (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994), pp. 29-30.
155. Snow, Star Raft, pp. 20-21.
156. Wilson, The Emperor's Giraffe, pp. 121-126.
157. Snow, Star Raft, pp. 23-24. Snow complicates the history by introducing a third party to the exchange of the "Malindi giraffe": the "king of Bengal." So here, an African state is the reciprocal partner with two Asian states, each intent on maximizing access to the other, in this case, by way of the goods of Africa.
158. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage Books), pp. 5, 6-10, 89-90.
159. Diop, African Origins, p. xv.
160. Du Bois, World and Africa, pp. 176-180, 196-198.