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You Can't Go Home Again: The Problem with Afrocentrism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Clarence E. Walker
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Extract

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 535 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

1. Feur, Lewis S., ed., Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics andPhilosophy (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1959), p. 320.Google Scholar

2. For the problematic of black racial reinvention, see Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Locke, Alain, The New Negro (1925; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1969)Google Scholar; Pickens, William, Bursting Bonds, ed. Andrews, William (1923; rept. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

3. See the article “Poll Says Most Blacks Prefer ‘Black’ to ‘African-American’,” New York Times, 01 29, 1991.Google Scholar

4. “Afrocentricity Is No Cause for Alarm,” Washington Post, 11 19, 1990.Google Scholar

5. Asante, Molefi Kete, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1990), p. 14.Google Scholar

6. Asante, Molefi Kete, Afrocentricity (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1988), p. 60.Google Scholar

7. Asante, , Afrocentricity.Google Scholar

8. Black Panther, 02 2, 1969.Google Scholar

9. Asante, , Kemet, p. 14.Google Scholar

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13. For a comparison of Africa's technological backwardness with China and India, see Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), chap. 1Google Scholar; and Oliver, Roland and Oliver, Caroline, eds., Africa in the Days of Exploration (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 1Google Scholar. The problem of the wheel is discussed in Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (London: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 74.Google Scholar

14. Fieldhouse, D. K., “The Price of Insularity,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 1, 1991, p. 6.Google Scholar

15. Fieldhouse, , “Price of Insularity.”Google Scholar

16. Lefkowitz, , “Not Out of Africa,” p. 39Google Scholar; and Asante, , Kemet, p. 5.Google Scholar

17. Lefkowitz, , “Not Out of Africa,” p. 31.Google Scholar

18. Lefkowitz, , “Not Out of Africa.”Google Scholar

19. Asante, , Afrocentricity, p. 39.Google Scholar

20. Oliver, , African Experience, p. 55Google Scholar; and Rice, Michael, Egypt's Making: The Origins of Ancient Egypt 5000–2000 BC (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 8, 58.Google Scholar

21. Rice, , Egypt's Making, p. 39.Google Scholar

22. California Aggie, 02 13, 1992, p. 2.Google Scholar

23. Quoted in Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–80 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 10.Google Scholar

24. California Aggie, 05 16, 1991, pp. 1, 2.Google Scholar

25. Harding, Vincent, “History: White, Negro and Black,” Southern Exposure 1 (1974): 52–62Google Scholar. See this article for the failings of contributionism.

26. California Aggie, 05 16, 1991 p. 1.Google Scholar

27. Walker, Clarence E., “The American Negro as Historical Outsider, 1836–1935,” in Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), pp. 89–90Google Scholar. James W. C. Pennington, another early chronicler of the black past, cautioned his peers about use of the words “Ethiopian and Africa.” The word “Ethiopian,” he wrote, “is a name derived from the complexion of the inhabitants, while Africa is a name given to a tract of country inhabited by nations of various complexions.” One could wish that the Afrocentrists showed a similar precision in their thinking and terminology.

28. I thank my own chairperson, Prof. Barbara Metcalf, for this formulation.

29. California Aggie, 05 16, 1991, p. 1.Google Scholar

30. Asante, , Kemet, p. 15.Google Scholar

31. Alba, Richard D., Ethnic Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Steinberg, Stephen, The Ethnic Myth, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1989).Google Scholar

32. Murray, Pauli, Song in a Weary Throat (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 330.Google Scholar

33. Murray, , Song.Google Scholar