The Utopian Worldview of Afrocentricity: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

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Notes

1. Countee Cullen, On These I Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1927).

2. Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African-American Images, 2003), 2.

3. Asante, 1983. “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 1: 15.

4. My reference to idealism speaks to the philosophical view that non-material things such as consciousness, ideas, values, culture, as well as ideal entities such as minds, spirits, and souls constitute the fundamental basis of reality. Not all idealists deny the existence of matter; certain idealists (for example, the sixteenth century mathematician, philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes) acknowledge there is something called matter or material entities, but their ontological existence is dependent on non-material entities such as minds, spirits, souls or God. In terms of social analysis, idealism emphasizes the primary (if not absolute) role of consciousness, ideas, values, myths, and culture, in their connection to social relations and practices, for understanding social reality. See, for example, T.I. Oizerman, The Main Trends in Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988).

5. The other dominant school of thought in AAS is the petit bourgeois cosmopolitanism of cultural criticism associated prominently with Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Bell Hooks, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Robin Kelley, among others. See John H. McClendon, “From Cultural Nationalism to Cultural Criticism: Philosophical Idealism, Paradigmatic Illusions and the Politics of Identity,” in Carole Boyce Davies et al. eds., Decolonizing the Academy (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), 3–26. For a similar analysis, see Adolph Reed, “‘What Are The Drums Saying, Booker?’: The Curious Role of the Black Public Intellectual,” in Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: New Press, 2000), 77–90.

7. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 99.

6. See Shannon M. Mussett, “On the Threshold of History: The Role of Nature and Africa in Hegel's Philosophy,” The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. 3, no. 1: 2003: 39–46. Reprinted in Tensional Landscapes: The Dynamics of Boundaries and Placements. Eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003).

8. Ibid.

9. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers, 1958), 343.

10. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000), 150–55.

11. Cited in Rayford W. Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 49.

12. Tunde Adeleke, The Case Against Afrocentrism (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 10.

13. Keto, Vision and Time: Historical Perspective of an African-Centered Paradigm (Lanham: University Press of America, 2001), 6.

14. Keto, Vision and Time, xii.

15. The notion of “epistemological break” derives from the French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser via Gaston Bachelard. To speak of an “epistemological break” is to highlight the discontinuity between two theoretical frameworks, scientific developments or philosophical revolutions; see Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1972). For a Leninist critique of Althusser, see Margaret A. Majumdar, Althusser and the End of Leninism? (East Haven: Pluto Press, 1995).

16. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103.

17. For further discussion, see Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

20. Ibid., xiii.

18. Keto, Vision and Time, 127.

19. Ibid., xii.

21. Gregor McLennan, Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London: Verso, 1981), 103.

22. Keto, The African Centered Perspective of History (Chicago: Research Associates School Times/Karnak House, 1994), 24.

23. Keto, Vision and Time, 95.

24. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 100.

25. Ibid., 97.

27. Ibid., 104.

28. Ibid., 105.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. See Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slaves in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1990).

32. See the important yet ignored work by Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London: Zed Press, 1981).

33. Asante, History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony (New York: Routledge, 2007).

34. Richard Reid, “Histories of Africa, Old and New,” English Historical Review (June 2008), 684.

35. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London, 1901), 2.

36. In class society the masses may include various social classes. But whatever the historical changeability of the class composition of the masses, this concept always: (1) has its core in the mass of the working people who produce material goods; (2) embraces the overwhelming majority of the population, as opposed to the anti-popular upper crust of society, the reactionary classes; and (3) includes all social strata who promote social progress (hence in certain historical circumstances the concept “masses” or “people” may include certain non-working classes, for example, the national bourgeoisie, insofar as they participate in the progressive movement of society, say, for example, during national liberation movements).

37. Keto, The African Centered Perspective of History, 119.

38. Adam Fairclough, “State of the Art: Historians and the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American Studies 24 (December 1990), 388.

39. Asante, Afrocentricity, 59.

40. Halisi and Mtume, The Quotable Karenga (Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications), 5.

41. For a similar argument, see Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marxism and Nationalism in Afro-America,” Social Theory and Practice 1 (Fall 1971), 6.

42. Jennifer Jordan, “Cultural Nationalism in the 1960s: Politics and Poetry,” in Adolph Reed. ed., Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 34.

44. Makungu M. Akinyela, “Rethinking Afrocentricity,” in Antonia Darder. ed., Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1995), 29.

43. Asante, Afrocentricity, 18.

45. Manthia Diawara, “Afro-Kitsch,” in Black Popular Culture. Edited by Michele Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 289.

46. Guillemette Andreu, Egypt in the Age of the Pyramids. Trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28.

47. Ibid., 14.

48. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 65.

49. See Milton Meltzer, Slavery: A World History (New York: Da Capo, 1993); Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006); Asante, Classical Africa (Maywood: Peoples Publishing Group, 1994), 27–9; Leonard H. Lesko, ed., Pharaoh's Workers: The Villagers of Deir el Medina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Rosalind M. Janssen and Jac J. Janssen, Growing Up in Ancient Egypt, 2^nd ed. (London: GHP, 2007).

50. Akinyela, “Rethinking Afrocentricity” (note 44), 27.

51. Halisi and Mtume, The Quotable Karenga, 25.

52. Asante, Afrocentricity, 102–3; italics added.

53. Asante, “African-American Studies: The Future of the Discipline,” in Norment, ed., The African-American Studies Reader (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2001), 343.

54. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990), 10.

55. Oliver C. Cox, “Max Weber on Social Stratification: A Critique,” American Sociological Review 15 (2) April 1950: 223-27.

56. Asante, Classical Africa, 27–9.

57. Ibid., 29.

58. See Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959).

59. Asante, Classical Africa, 29.

60. Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1991), 141–3; See also Diop, African Origins, 205.

61. Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, 142.

62. Akinyela makes a similar point. See Akinyela, “Rethinking Afrocentricity,” 29–30.

63. Bernard M. Mugabane, “The Evolution of Class Structure in Africa,” in African Sociology – Towards a Critical Perspective: The Collected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000), 255.

64. Asante, Afrocentricity, 126–7.

65. Akinyela, “Rethinking Afrocentricity,” 28–9.

66. Melba Joyce Boyd, “Afrocentrics, Afro-elitists, and Afro-eccentrics,” in Manning Marable, ed., Dispatches from the Ebony Tower (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 207.

68. Molefi K. Asante, “Afrocentricity: Notes on a Disciplinary Position,” in An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an Afrocentric Renaissance (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2007), 36.

67. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, 10.

69. Christopher J. Williams makes a similar point in his excellent article, “In Defence of Materialism: A Critique of Afrocentric Ontology,” Race & Class 47, no. 1: 35–48.

70. See, for example, G. Nzongola-Ntalaja, “The Political Economy Approach in African Studies,” in James E. Turner, ed., The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies (Ithaca: Africana Studies & Research Center, 1984), 301–39.

71. Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 1: 7.

72. Amiri Baraka, Autobiography of Leroi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997), 357.