Afrocentrism: Between crosscultural grand narrative and cultural relativism

The Journal of African History

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 327-340

  De Moraes Farias, P F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

African diaspora; Afrocentrism; historiography; intellectual

Indexed keywords

EID: 85008521137     PISSN: 00218537     EISSN: 14695138     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S002185370200840X     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. W. J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, 1998), 3, 9-13, 17, 29, 32, 35-7, 62, 84-5, 94-5, 191, 225, 230-1, 236, 239.
2. For two of these other perspectives, see C. Tsehloane Keto, The African Centred Perspective of History (London, 1994); and M. M. Akinyela, ‘Rethinking Afrocentricity: the foundation of a theory of critical Africentricity’, in A. Darder (ed.), Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States (Westport CT, 1995), 21-39.
3. Moses, Afrotopia, 36.
4. Afrotopia. 36.
5. Afrotopia. 5.
6. See also Asante, The Painful Demise, 113, for a reference to Herskovits as a pre-Afrocentric author.
7. For instance p. 209, line 8
8. See S. Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London, 1998), reviewed by V. Y. Mudimbe in Journal of African History (41 [2000], 291-4). Also in Journal of African History, 32 (1991), 515-19, see W. MacGaffey, ‘Who owns Ancient Egypt?’.
9. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), 205-6.
10. See G. Balakrishnan, ‘The age of identity?’, New Left Review, 2nd series, 16 (2002), 130-42.
11. Y. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation: A Study in Israeli Heresy and Fantasy (London, 1987).
12. See the comments on this by E. Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, trans. from the German by D. Lorton (London, 2001), 219. 14 See Moses, Afrotopia, 9, 32, 37-8.
13. See H. L. Gates, Jr., Wonders of the African World (New York, 1999). A controversy around the TV series raged in late 1999 in NUAFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU and other networks, largely around comments by Professor Ali Mazrui, who objected to aspects of the series, including the way a Ghanaian tourist guide featured in it appeared to say that Africans shared the guilt for the Atlantic slave trade, and Gates Jr.'s ‘unnecessary’ on-camera references to the State of Israel.
14. See K. Masiha et al., ‘African experimental aeronautics: a 2,000-year-old model glider’, in I. Van Sertima (ed.), Egypt Revisited (2nd ed., New Brunswick NJ, 1989), 92-9, translated into French in T. Obenga, La philosophie africaine de la période pharaonique 2780-330 avant notre ère (Paris, 1990), 347-54. The paper reflects a strand of Egyptian cultural nationalism which goes beyond Egypt's Islamic past to link up with the Pharaonic era, and which is briefly examined in Shavit, Hebrew Nation, 95.
15. See A. M. Roth, ‘Building bridges to Afrocentrism: a letter to my Egyptological colleagues’, 5. This essay was originally posted on 26 January 1995 at ftp://oi.uchicago. edu/pub/papers/AMRoth_Afrocentrism.ascii.txt. It is now available at http://www.sas. upenn.edu/African_Studies/Articles_Gen/afrocent_roth.html. It was also published in the Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt, 167 (1995), 14-17, and 168 (1995), 15-21.
16. Recently, Asko Parpola, professor of Indology at the University of Helsinki, has reminded readers of The Times Higher Education Supplement (8 Mar. 2002, p. 33) that ‘Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj movement, claimed that even railway trains were known to the Vedic Aryans’.
17. Roth, ‘Building bridges’, 1-2, 9.
18. Cf. Howe, Afrocentrism, 11-12.
19. See François-Xavier Fauvelle, L'Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, histoire et idéologie (with preface by E. M'Bokolo) (Paris, 1996).
20. See M. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York, 1996).
21. See J. L. Melgarejo Vivanco, El problema olmeca (Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, 1975); I. Van Sertima, They Came before Columbus (New York, 1976), and ‘Reply to my critics ‘, Journal of Pan-African Studies, 1 (1998-9), 87-93; H. Lawrence (Kofi Wangara), ‘Mandinga voyages across the Atlantic’, in I. Van Sertima (ed.), African Presence in Early America (New Brunswick, 1992), 169-214; B. Ortiz de Montellano, ‘Multiculturalism, cult archaeology, and pseudoscience’, in F. B. Harrold and R. A. Eve (eds.), Cult Archaeology and Creationism, expanded edn. (Iowa City, 1995), 134-51.
22. Two volumes of Bernal's planned four have been published: Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, I : The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, II : The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (London, 1987 and 1991).
23. On such issues, see also Berlinerblau, Heresy, 191-2. In addition, Lefkowitz, in Afrocentrismes, 239, on the methodological pitfall of taking Herodotus too literally.
24. P. Diagne, Cheikh Anta Diop et l'Afrique dans l'histoire du monde (Paris, 1997; reprinted 2002), 118, 121
25. See Berlinerblau, Heresy, 163, 169, 172-3.
26. T. Obenga, Le sens de la lutte contre l'africanisme eurocentriste (Paris, 2001).
27. Cf. ’ les spécialistes du niveau de T. Obenga’ (Afrocentrismes, p. 85) and ’ les spécialistes du niveau de Tourneux’ (Obenga, Le sens de la lutte, 17, 34).
28. Obenga, Le sens de la lutte, 18, 44-7, 56-65, 96-7, 103, 111-12.
29. Le sens de la lutte. 16-22, 24-40, 43-8, 61, 80, 86-7, 92-5.
30. See A. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (3rd ed., London, 1957; reprinted 1966), 57, 470, 488, 498, 597, 603, 607, 622; R. O. Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian (Oxford, 1962), 286, 316.
31. C. A. Diop (selections from Nations nègres et culture [1955] and Antériorité des civilisations nègres: mythe ou vérité historique ? [1967]), ed. and trans. into English by Mercer Cook, The African Origin of Civilization-Myth or Reality (Westport, 1974), 7; for other relevant passages, see C. A. Diop, Antériorité des civilisations nègres (2nd ed., Paris, 1993), 54, 59.
32. Obenga, La philosophie africaine, 232, 239, and idem, Le sens de la lutte, 43-6.
33. See E. W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (London and Edinburgh, 1863-93; reprinted in two volumes Cambridge, 1984), I, 1462. Needless to say, toponyms referring to ‘blackness’ occur across languages, and are not necessarily linked to the skin colour of local people-see Walker, We Can't Go Home Again, xx, on the Black Hills of South Dakota.
34. J. P. Allen, Middle Egyptian-An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge, 2000), 22, 339 n. 21, 470, 510.
35. Among other publications by M. K. Asante see The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia, 1987); Afrocentricity (3rd rev. ed., Trenton NJ, 1988), and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton NJ, 1990).
36. See Asante, Painful Demise, 3; Moses, Afrotopia, 36-7.
37. On which see L. Wacquant, ‘From slavery to mass incarceration’, New Left Review, 2nd series, 13 (2002), 41-60.
38. See G. M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1979), 16, 55, 271-5; M. Lobban, White Man's Justice : South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford, 1996), 28-32. On Asante and Fanon, see also Asante, Kemet, 175-80.
39. See K. A. Bard, ‘Ancient Egyptians and the issue of race’, and E. T. Vermeule, ‘The world turned upside down’, in Lefkowitz and Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited, 107 and 274.
40. F. J. Yurco, ‘Two tomb-wall painted reliefs of Ramesses III and Sety I and Ancient Nile Valley population diversity ‘, in T. Celenko (ed.), Egypt in Africa (Indianapolis, 1996), 109-11.
41. See C. A. Diop, ‘L'Antiquité africaine par l'image’, special issue of Notes Africaines, 145-6 (1975), 33, Fig. 8.
42. E. Hornung, Tal der Könige (6th ed., Dü sseldorf and Zü rich, 1999), 148, Figs. 123-5, and Das Grab Sethos’ I (2nd ed., Dü sseldorf and Zü rich, 1999), 98-9, Figs. 58-9
43. For a concise introduction to these notions, see S. T. Smith, ‘Ancient Egyptian imperialism: ideological vision or economic exploitation ?’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 7 (1997), 301-7.
44. However, for a discussion of the historical evolution, and range of variation, of the representations of foreign black Africans in Ancient Egyptian iconography, see J. Vercoutter, ‘Nature et importance des rapports de l'Egypte pharaonique avec l'Afrique noire sous la XVIIIe dynastie (1580-1314 av. J.-C.)’, in Afrique noire et monde méditerrane én dans l'antiquité-Colloque de Dakar: 19-24 janvier 1976 (Dakar, 1978), 73-81.
45. See Fauvelle, L'Afrique, pp. 50, 118.
46. See also C. E. Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville TN, 1991).
47. See M. Marable, ‘Introduction: black studies and the racial mountain’, in M. Marable (ed.), Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York, 2000), 1-28, especially 19.
48. Asante, Kemet, 15. Asante's passage is rich in echoes of M. J. Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (2nd ed., Boston, 1958).
49. Cf. Moses, Afrotopia, 227: ‘Many Afrocentrists focus inordinately on the romanticization of pharaohs, preferring to ignore the real Africa, where cruel, illiterate thugs terrorize the populations of cities lacking plumbing, electricity, or hospitals’.
50. See D. M. Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill NC, 1997); Moses, Afrotopia, 21-2.
51. It must be pointed out, however, that certain strands of Afrocentrism, like that represented by Chancellor Williams's The Destruction of Black Civilization (3rd ed., Chicago, 1987; reprinted 1995), are notorious for their anti-Muslim bias.
52. Marable, ‘A plea that scholars act upon, not just interpret, events’, 190, in H. L. Gates, Jr., and M. Marable, ‘A debate on activism in Black Studies’, published in Marable (ed.), Dispatches, 186-91.
53. C. A. Diop, Nations nègres et culture: de l'antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l'Afrique noire d'aujourd'hui (3rd ed., 2 vols., Paris, 1979), 173-6. See also Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, 111-13, 249-50; Fauvelle, L'Afrique, pp. 136-41; Fauvelle-Aymar in Afrocentrismes, 35-6; Shavit, History in Black, 168; and Diagne, Cheikh Anta Diop, 33-4, 63, 70.
54. See M. Diouf and M. Mbodj, ‘The shadow of Cheikh Anta Diop’, in V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987 (Chicago, 1992), 118-35, especially 121.
55. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, 249-50, and idem, Antériorité, 241-2. See also Shavit, History in Black, 168.
56. On Muller's views, see G. J. Renier, History, Its Purpose and Method (London, 1950), 134; and H.-I. Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris, 1954), 133.
57. For a recent critique of it, see P. J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), 26-9, 32.