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range of ideas and stances that collectively constitute what is called Afrocentrism. Some are demagogic a n d even fascist
or racist; others are m o r e n u a n c e d and thoughtful, and probably worthy o f
o u r attention and engagement.
T h e most i m p o r t a n t Afrocentric theses that can give us pause are these:
First, there exists a body of scholarship and o f intellectual assumptions that
exhibit a decidedly white or Eurocentric bias in support of a white or Eurocentric
political or social hegemony. Second, there is an African or non-white (or nonWestern) view of the world and of history that has been suppressed in a n d by
the Western world, once again in s u p p o r t o f a white or a Eurocentric hegemony. Third, African peoples can come to full self-determination a n d achieve
full humanity only when they are p e r m i t t e d to overthrow and d e n o u n c e white
or Eurocentric premises and when they can fully realize a n d articulate their
view and their consciousness through their own self-creation.
That, I think, is a reasonable short list o f Afrocentric beliefs, differing f r o m
the pop-culture Afrocentrism-largely an American expression--that speaks o f
constructing identity through acts of c o n s u m p t i o n or makes irrational assertions o f black superiority, a largely nonsensical reassertion of nineteenth-century E u r o p e a n race theories.
What are the origins of these Afrocentric ideas? I am not sure, b u t I suggest
three areas of inquiry. First, there are the intellectual trends of post-modernism, Marxism, deconstruction, and other ideas that became especially p o p u l a r
in many corridors of the post-World War II academy. (Afrocentrism, after all,
has had its biggest effect on education.) These doctrines have suggested that
the bourgeois social order is corrupt, repressive, and, most important, arbitrary, that knowledge is power, that truth is bourgeois and anyone is capable
of f o r m i n g his own truth to suit his own political and social purposes. Therefore, Foucault, Derrida, FredricJameson, and Stephen Greenblatt have been
just as i m p o r t a n t in the rise of Afrocentrism and its offshoot, multiculturalism,
a
Gerald Early is professor of English and director of the African and African-American studies program at Washington University, St. Louis, MO. Wilson J. Moses is
professor of history at Pennyslvania State University, State College, PA. Louis Wilson
is professor of African-American and African History at Smith College, Northampton,
MA. Mary R. Lefkowitz is Mellon Professor of Humanities at Wellesley College,
Wellesley, MA. Please address correspondence to
575 Ewing Street,
Princeton, NJ 08540. These remarks are from an October 1993 conference on
Afrocentrism sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for New American Community and Washington University's Department of African and African-American
Studies. Printed by permission.
AcademicQuestions,
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45
as was, say, the political turmoil of the 1960s. In other words, a climate in the
academy in which the most fashionable "scholarship" is often sharply antiW e s t e r n m a k e s A f r o c e n t r i s m , as a critique o f the West, possible, a n d
Afrocentrism in turn reinforces the intellectual trends that b r o u g h t it into
being.
Second, Afrocentrism is probably i m b e d d e d in earlier forms o f black nationalist t h o u g h t - t h e black aesthetic of the seventies, the black power movem e n t o f the sixties, a n d pan-Africanism in the various forms it has taken since
the eighteenth century. As an ideology it represents the c o n t i n u e d longing
a m o n g black Americans for some set of ideas that would bind t h e m together
as a c o m m u n i t y and offer some alternative to an assimilation that is either
foreclosed by whites or seen by blacks as an admission o f inferiority and defeat.
It must be said, though, that historically n o t all manifestations o f black nationalism are or were anti-Western; some are decidedly pro-Western in many
respects. Nor is there anything inherent in the study of Africans or black people
in the United States that is necessarily anti-Western. It could even be argued
that the d e v e l o p m e n t of these fields of study, as virtual moral or emotional
imperatives, in the past twenty years or so is purely and utterly Western. But
the search by black people for a c o m m o n historical mission, for the elements
that bind t h e m together as a group, other than a c o m m o n history o f oppression, explains why Afrocentrism, as a h e i g h t e n e d form o f nationalism, has
c o m e into being at a time when blacks feel their sense o f physical and spiritual
c o m m u n i t y to be singularly u n d e r siege by many aspects of post-industrial
liberal democratic capitalist culture.
As an academic p h e n o m e n o n , Afrocentrism serves the p u r p o s e o f binding
together the various strands of African and African-American studies, transf o r m i n g t h e m f r o m an interdisciplinary hodge-podge into a unified discipline,
with ideological and intellectual goals, political purpose, a n d a set of commonly u n d e r s t o o d m e t h o d s and theories.
Third, Afrocentrism also has roots in the great American tendency to seek
mental health t h r o u g h right-living and right believing. In that respect Carter
G. W o o d s o n ' s c o n f u s e d a r g u m e n t s a b o u t the t h e r a p e u t i c value o f black
history in his 1933 b o o k The Miseducation of the Negro, a virtual bible for
many Afrocentrists, is as an intellectual construct not unlike the works o f the
great mind-healers and positive thinkers from Mary Baker Eddy to N o r m a n
Vincent Peale, from Father Divine to Elijah M u h a m m a d . W o o d s o n m a d e the
c o n n e c t i o n between black history and black education, properly construed,
a n d black self-esteem, long before "self-esteem" itself became a "cant word" in
the culture.
W o o d s o n ' s contentions are a truism to many blacks. But there is no real
evidence to s u p p o r t the claim that black history taught in a certain way produces black self-esteem. Indeed, it may even be argued that some pedagogical
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approaches suggested by Afrocentrists might simply induce m o r e black resentment or intensify black alienation. And neither resentment nor alienation
is a proper mental or emotional building block for a sense o f community.
Much of the recent attempt to create Afrocentric schools---or, one might
say, the black political equivalent of a Hebrew or Catholic school---comes from
an understandable desperation due to the fact that many black communities
are so beset by social problems that they are ill-equipped to handle.
T h e r e is much to consider in the complexity in Afrocentrism. These few
preliminary remarks hardly do the subject justice. I hope that this discussion
will take it out of the realm of sensational newspaper stories and emotional
outbursts to a measured deliberation of why America continues to be conf o u n d e d by race and befuddled by its inability to educate all o f its citizens well.
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Academic Q u e s t i o n s / S p r i n g 1994
I have treated only a few of the many fraudulent claims m a d e in Stolen Legacy.
Many m o r e examples could be produced; for example, James insists that the
Greeks did n o t win their war against Persia in 490 and 480-79 B.C., as has
always been thought, but states, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the battles o f Marathon and Salamis were indecisive. James misrepresents history in this way in order to depict the ancient Greeks as a quarrelsome
and chaotic people, incapable of p r o d u c i n g philosophy, which, according to
James, "requires an e n v i r o n m e n t which is free f r o m disturbance and worries"
[24]. Such misinformation entitles Stolen Legacy to a place on the shelf with
other hate literature, such as The Secret Relationship Between Blacks anclJews. But
it also deserves to be rated as one of the most successful, and, alas, influential
"myths" in recent history. A n d it is distinctly frightening that school children
are being taught to believe that this myth is true.
ON THE BELFRY
Anna Balakian, one of Comparative
Literature's leading scholars, confronts the
"current zeitgeist" in contemporary literary
studies: the importance assumed by criticism
and its devalorization of the literary work;
the use and misuse of literary texts for
ideological purposes, relativism and
anthropomorphism: and multiculturalism
and the sociological approach to the arts.
Dogma and
Disquietude in
the Critical
Arena
ByAnna Balakian