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Notes
1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey; A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). See pages xxv–xxvi for Gates's initial discussion of the Talking Book. For a discussion of "call and response," see John F. Callahan, In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth Century Black Fiction, 2nd ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 14–17.
2. This reflects the name and orientation of both the University of Toledo's program, where I was a recent visiting faculty member, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston's department, where I currently teach. Due to downsizing, the University of Toledo's program has since been eliminated, and African American Studies courses are now a sub-field within Sociology and Anthropology. It initially took some time for me to transition from the terms “Black Studies” or “African American Studies”, and acclimate to the term “Africana Studies”, all the more so, when early on during this acclimation period, a witty prankster quipped “Afrikaner Studies! What kind of name is that for Black Studies department?! That sounds like White Supremacy Studies to me! What do you teach – principles of apartheid, Boer nationalism, how to speak Afrikaans?”
3. Greg Thomas, “The Black Studies Wars: Multiculturalism vs Afrocentricity,” Village Voice, January 17, 1995, 23–29.
4. See The Nguzo Saba, www.wosesacramento.org/nguzo.htm. Kujichagulia is a Swahili word which is translated as self-determination. It is the second of the “Seven Principles of Blackness” or Nguzo Saba which Maulana Karenga's Kawaida philosophy defines as the “matrix and moral minimum value system” by which black people ought to govern their daily lives. The Seven Principles are celebrated during the African American holiday Kwanzaa.
5. Recent theoretical work has reconfigured Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere. Counterpublics
(counterpublic spheres) are distinguished from the bourgeois public sphere and defined by feminist scholar Nancy Fraser as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interest and needs.” See Robert Ansen and Daniel C. Brouer, eds., Counterpublics and the State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), who quote Fraser's definition in their “Introduction” and add that counterpublics affirm the “specificity of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some other axis of difference” rather than appealing to the “universality” of the bourgeois public sphere. The conventional wisdom in the black community is that the black “public intellectuals” (i.e. cosmopolitan pluralists or cultural critics) speak primarily to white audiences as self-appointed interpreters and explainers of the black experience and that Afrocentrists, in contrast, speak directly to a black audience. Reality is more complex, however, as black public intellectuals do speak to a black audience as well – although it is, perhaps, an elite or bourgeois black audience. As Ansen and Brouer point out, there are a multiplicity of public spheres with permeable boundaries; thus we may allow for a black bourgeois public sphere as well as a black counterpublic. For varied analyses of, and distinctions between, the black public sphere and the black counterpublic see Public Culture. Vol.7, No. 1 (Fall 1994), special issue: The Black Public Sphere. Also, contrary to conventional wisdom, Afrocentric discourse does not remain sequestered in the black community; it eventually reaches a wider and whiter audience (e.g. white students who enroll in a Black Studies course to satisfy a university's multicultural requirements). This is in accord with Fraser's analysis: counterpublics have a dual character, they function on one hand as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” and, on the other, as “bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed at wider publics.”
6. I am indebted to Keith Gilyard, Distinguished Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Pennsylvania State University, who reviewed this manuscript and suggested this analytical distinction and the term “cosmopolitan pluralists.” My colleague Rod Bush, whose article appears in this volume, prefers the term “centrist liberals.” While “centrist liberals” might be a perfect descriptor in discussing national politics, I do not think that it fully captures the cosmopolitan pluralists' terrain.
7. See Thomas, “The Black Studies Wars” (note 3).
8. The recent election of left-leaning Sundiata Cha-Jua as president of NCBS is an anomaly that reputedly has caused some internal consternation.
9. Yet McClendon, curiously – given the position he advocates – was once Associate Professor of American Cultural Studies at Bates College.
10. The Black Left consists of African American activists who are engaged in a struggle for Black Liberation and socialist transformation. As scientific socialists, Black Left activists are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, committed to working-class led struggle, international solidarity with other working class and oppressed peoples, and the elimination of all forms of oppression including patriarchy and homophobia. Left nationalism, a specific political tendency within the broader Black Left, recognizes that the African American people are an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. See John McClendon's take on the Black Left in “Marxism in Ebony Contra Black Marxism: Categorical Implications,” in the online publication PROUDFLESH: A New African Journal of Culture, Politics and Consciousness, Issue #6 (2007).
11. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Classic, 1989 [1903]), 162.
12. Ibid., 168–69.
13. Ibid., 170.
14. Ibid., 171.
15. See Abdul Alkalimat and Associates, Introduction to Afro-American Studies, 6th ed. (Chicago: Twenty-first Century Books, 1986), 21, and Maulana Karenga Introduction to Black Studies, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2002), 30–31.
16. Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 20. Karenga credits Nathan Hare, coordinator of the nation's first Black Studies department at San Francisco State College, with coining this slogan.
17. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1969 [1933]), 52.
18. Manning Marable, “Discussion: Black Intellectuals in Conflict: Manning Marable Responds,” New Politics, Vol. V, No.4 (Winter 1966), 63.
19. For a succinct yet excellent analysis of African American left nationalism and its relationship to both cultural nationalism and black socialism see sections V and VI of Manning Marable, “Race, Class and Conflict: Intellectual Debates on Race Relations Research in the United States Since 1960, A Social Science Bibliographical Essay,” in Abdul Alkalimat, ed., Paradigms in Black Studies: Intellectual History, Cultural Meaning and Political Ideology (Chicago: Twenty-first Century Books, 1990), 165–206. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
20. Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 113
21. Frank Freidel, “Foreword,” in Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, xi.
22. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, 113.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 121.
25. Paul Buhle, “Christian Socialism,” in Mari Jo Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 131–33.
26. Ibid., 132.
27. Alkalimat, Paradigms in Black Studies (note 19); Manning Marable, “Black Studies: Marxism and the Black Intellectual Tradition,” in Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff (eds.), The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, Vol.III (New York: Praeger, 1986). For an interesting summary of the debate in The Black Scholar, see Keith Gilyard's biography, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Literary Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). Killens was, of course, one of the “leftists” vilified by Harold Cruse in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, unfairly so because Killens' novels and his activism synthesized nationalist and leftist perspectives. In Chaper 22, “I Always Said Class and Race, 1974–1977,” Gilyard examines the impact of ongoing debates between nationalists and Marxists upon Killens' social world, and identifies the “centerpiece” of the Black Scholar debate as an article by Haki Madhubuti, entitled “The Latest Purge: The Attack on Black Nationalism and PanAfricanism by the New Left, the Sons and Daughters of the Old Left,” in the September 1974 issue. In subsequent issues of the journal, a vigorous debate ensued between nationalists and Marxists, ultimately prompting the editor, Nathan Hare, to resign, “complaining of a Marxist takeover and seizure” of the journal. Hare was succeeded by left-leaning Robert Chrisman who is still the managing editor today. Hare released his letter of resignation to black media outlets, and shortly thereafter, black news reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault wrote a series of articles in The New York Times detailing the splits in the black liberation movement between Marxists and nationalists, including the famous article reporting Amiri Baraka's “about-face” shift from cultural nationalism to Marxism-Leninism.
28. Comic relief and humorous satirical caricatures differ qualitatively from caricatures made under the guise of serious scholarship. In their article in this volume (“Historiography against History”), Marxist scholars Reese and Simba deride Afrocentrism and the related ideologies of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism for espousing a nightmarish fantasy consisting of black is beautiful, the white man is the devil, and the desire for a world without white people where blacks once again rule. Indeed, this depiction is more cartoonish than my own admittedly cartoonish satire. Reese and Simba also erroneously conflate the Nation of Islam's ideology with Afrocentrism.
29. Ernest Mandel, The Place of Marxism in History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1994), 9–10.
30. Thus the reviled “synthesist” is one who advocates revisionist syntheses such as Left Nationalism, Black Marxism or Black Internationalism.
31. Maulana Karenga, Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom from Ancient Egypt (Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1984); Maulana Karenga, ed. Reconstructing Kemetic Culture (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1990); Maulana Karenga, Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2004); Maulana Karenga and Jacob H. Carruthers, eds., Kemet and the African Worldview (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1986); Jacob H. Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1984); and Jacob H. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present (London: Karnak House, 1995).
32. Tsenay Serequeberhan, “African Philosophy: The Point in Question,” in Tsenay Serequeberhan, ed., African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 3–28.
33. Lucius Outlaw, “African, African American, and Africana Philosophy,” in John Pittman, ed., African American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions (New York: Rutledge, 1997), 63–93. Outlaw discusses an alternative typology by O. Nkombe and A.J. Smet and one by Valentine Mudimbe.
34. Joseph Omoregbe, “African Philosophy: Yesterday and Today,” in Emmanuel Eze, ed., African Philosophy: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 3–8.
35. Innocent Onyewuenyi, “Is There an African Philosophy?” In Serequeberhan, African Philosophy, 34–35.
36. Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1970]), 107.
37. Kwame Gyekye, “An Essay on African Philosophical Thought,” in Albert Mosely, ed., African Philosophy: Selected Readings (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 341.
38. Ibid., 341–42. Gyeke quotes from John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990), 74.
39. Théophile Obenga however points to a fundamentally materialist conception of reality evident in Kemetic or Ancient Egyptian cosmology. In African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780–330 BC (Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh, 2004), citing the contrast of Egyptian creation to Hebrew, Sumerian, Greek, Indian, and Mayan creation myths, he states “There is something uncannily contemporary about the ancient Egyptian explanation for all that is, the Universe of all existence. For right from the start, it posits neither God nor Chaos-as-Darkness, but Matter in the form of primal water….According to [the Pyramid Text] everything originates in matter, a primordial matter difficult to know. It is altogether natural that the image that occurred to Ancient Egyptian thinkers as they sought to represent this primal matter was that of water, dwelling as they did on the banks of the Nile…”
40. See New York Times report on the staid Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finally accepting an article giving credence to parapsychology. Benedict Carey, “Journal's Article on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage,” www.nytimes.com (January 5, 2011). The Times story begins: “One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.”
44. Robinson, Black Marxism, 2.
41. See for example, Socialism and Democracy's theme issue “Democracy, Philosophy, and Social Movements in Africa” (No. 45, November 2007). The editor, Teodros Kiros, in his own article “Moral Economy: An Original Economic Form for the African Condition,” turns to the Classical Egyptian concept of Ma'at (“truth, balance, order and justice”) – which he contrasts with the Classical Greek concept of Logos (“the rational word”) – as a “modern moral principle which can motivate both (a) organic leaders of the people and (b) social movements themselves to reorganize the public sphere in Africa” (171).
42. Of course McClendon is well aware of this tradition, having himself authored a magnum opus on C.L.R. James, C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).
43. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983), 1. See also McClendon's critical review of this book, entitled “Marxism in Ebony Contra Black Marxism” (note 10).
45. Here Robinson is expressing an idea similar to Martin Bernal's assertion that eighteenth century Europeans created a Eurocentric Aryan model of world history which supplanted their own Ancient model of World history that had acknowledged the contributions of African civilization and, in Robinson's emphasis, Muslim civilization as well (including the Moorish/African conquest of the Iberian peninsula).
46. Layli Phillips, ed., The Womanist Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), xx–xxi.
47. As quoted in a letter from Engels to Eduard Bernstein, November 3, 1882.
48. Clenora Hudson-Weems, “Cultural and Agenda Conflicts in Academia: Critical issues for Africana Women's Studies,” in Phillips, The Womanist Reader, 39.
49. Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–2.
50. Ibid., 315.
51. For a succinct discussion of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, see Yusuf Nuruddin, “Promises and Pitfalls of Reparations” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 16, No.1 (Winter-Spring 2002), 97. Also at http://sdonline.org/back-issues/#31
52. Ibid. See discussion on social implosion.
53. The analogy is apt and, indeed, I include myself among the culpable. At the onset of this project I envisioned a collection of pedagogically persuasive essays aimed at teaching readers the necessity of a race-and-class analysis. The purpose of such an anthology would have been to convert young and still impressionable Afrocentric-leaning scholars and students to an anti-capitalist viewpoint, a viewpoint which would lead to their adoption of a synthesiszed African-centered leftist paradigm. My preferred mode of discourse was gentle persuasion, i.e. political education via the presentation of clear irrefutable evidence. Then, to my great dismay, I discovered that some of my comrades were hardline Marxists who came “packing,” armed with semi-automatics with the intent of spraying the Afrocentric camp. I couldn't let that go down, as my intent was to recruit Afrocentrists, not to hunt them, confront them, and shoot them in cold blood. I quickly decided that if I inevitably was going to get caught up in a shootout, at least I could choose sides. So I broke ranks, turned-coat, and with both guns blazing opened fire on the hardliners. Mea culpa.
54. See Joy DeGruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Milwaukee: Uptone Press, 2005); also Yusuf Nuruddin, “The Sambo Thesis Revisited: Slavery's Impact upon the African American Personality,” in Socialism and Democracy, Special Issue: Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, Vol. 17, No.1 pp. 291–338 (Winter–Spring 2003); also at http://sdonline.org/back-issues/#33