Afrocentricity
Afrocentricity is an academic theory and approach to scholarship that seeks to center the experiences and peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts.
[3][9] Those who identify as specialists in Afrocentricity, including historians, philosophers, and sociologists, call themselves "Africologists"[10][11] or "Afrocentrists.
According to her, Afrocentricity incorporates African dance, music, rituals, legends, literature, and oratures as key features of its expository approach.
[13] Midas Chanawe outlined in his historical survey of the development of Afrocentricity how experiences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Middle Passage, and legal prohibition of literacy, shared by enslaved African-Americans, followed by the experience of dual cultures (e.g., Africanisms, Americanisms), resulted in some African-Americans re-exploring their African cultural heritage rather than choosing to be Americanized.
Additionally, the African-American experience of ongoing racism emphasized the importance that culture and its relative nature could have on their intellectual enterprise.
Examples of the kinds of arguments that presaged Afrocentricity include pieces published in the Freedom's Journal (1827) that drew connections between Africans and ancient Egyptians, African-American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and David Walker, who highlighted the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians as Africans to undermine the white supremacist assertion that Africans were inferior, and the assertions of the Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey, who argued that ancient Egypt laid the foundation for civilization in world history.
"[16] Other antecedents to Afrocentricity identified by Asante include the 1948 work of Cheikh Anta Diop when he introduced the idea of an "African Renaissance",[10][17] J.A.
[10] Temple University, the institutional home of Molefi Kete Asante and site of the first PhD program in the field of Africana Studies, which at Temple is named Africology and African American Studies,[18] is widely regarded as the leading institution for scholarship in Afrocentricity.
[9] As a global intellectual enterprise, Afrocentricity is studied, taught, and exemplified at institutions and locations, such as Quilombismo (which was initiated by Abdias Nascimento) in Brazil, the Universitario del Pacifico in Buenaventura, Colombia, the programs of Africamaat in Paris, France, the Centre for African Renaissance at the University of South Africa in South Africa, a training program operated by Stanley Mkhize at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and the Molefi Kete Asante Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
However, it has come to refer to a broad cultural movement of the late twentieth century that has a set of philosophical, political, and artistic ideas which provides the basis for the musical, sartorial, and aesthetic dimensions of the African personality.
To this end Afrocentricity seeks to examine every aspect of the subject place of Africans in historical, literary, architectural, ethical, philosophical, economic, and political life.
[43] As a result of the popular misconceptions of what Afrocentricity is not, Stewart indicates that this has had a negative impact in terms of public perception.
[23] This has been characterized as an “ongoing ideological warfare to ensure the continuation of the subjugation of African people as objects of analysis, thus discouraging them from being agents in their own history.”[23] Additionally, it has been further indicated that those who charge scholars of Afrocentricity of producing political propaganda, do so as well, while portraying it as scholarship, in order to deny the agency of Africans and to avoid critique.
[34] As Kete Asante further notes, while African-centeredness may suggest a limitation in geography, Afrocentricity can be performed anywhere in the world as a form of academic study.
"[10] Esonwanne (1992) critiqued Asante's Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990) and characterized its discourse as "implausible", its argumentation as "disorganized", its analysis as "crude and garbled", its perceived lack of seriousness in study as harmful to the "serious study of African American and African cultures", as being part of a "whole project of Afrocentrism", and as being "off-handedly racist".
[52] Additionally, Asante indicated that, due to the lack of specific example cited from his earlier work to support the characterization of it as "off-handedly racist", it was "not only a serious breach of professionalism but a grotesque and dishonest intellectual ploy".
[52] Asante (1993) went on to clarify that Cheikh Anta Diop, Maulana Karenga, and Wade Nobles, despite differences in professional backgrounds or academic interests, were all scholars in the theory of Afrocentricity.
[54] Asante further critiqued and characterized Hill-Collins (2006) as being "not only poor scholarship", but a "form of self-hatred" that is typically "engaged in by vulgar careerists whose plan is to distance themselves from African agency".
[54] Asante characterized her critiques of Afrocentricity as being supportive of a manufactured intellectual agenda and predicated on the reactionary politics surrounding modern American history.
[54] Asante indicates that the correct understanding that Hill-Collins has is that "Afrocentricity is a social theory in the sense that it explains the dislocation, disorientation, and mental enslavement of African people as being a function of white racial hegemony.
"[54] Asante indicates that the earliest Africologists (e.g., Nah Dove, Tsehloane Keto, Ama Mazama, Kariamu Welsh, Terry Kershaw) of the "Temple Circle" or contemporaneous scholars (e.g., Maulana Karenga, Wade Nobles, Asa Hilliard, Clenora Hudson-Weems, Linda Myers) had no conscious intention of creating a civil religion as Hill-Collins claims.
