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Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
/
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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Two Scholars Discuss Afrocentrism
Wilson Jeremiah Moses & Cane Hope
Felder
Below are two excellent examinations of
Afrocentric identity, theory, and history.
Wilson J. Moses is a
historian and Cane Hope Felder a theologian. Each has a particular
reserve to Afrocentrism as a racial ideology.
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*
Wilson J. Moses: Historical
Sketches of Afrocentrism
I have not discovered who was the first person
to employ the expression "Afrocentrism," but it was not
professor Molefi Asante, although the term has been closely
associated with him for almost two decades. . . . the actual term
"Afrocentrism" was employed by W.E.B. Du Bois, possibly
as early as 1961, and definitely by 1962. [See] Du Bois's
typescript draft of "proposed plans for an Encyclopedia
Africana," which was to be "unashamedly Afro-Centric,
but not indifferent to the impact of the outside world."
* * *
Dr. Asante's efforts to appropriate the term
Afrocentrism began in 1980 with the publication of his Afrocentricity:
The Theory of Social Change. The work was a brief essay
concerned with a historical analysis of African American political
theory, and offering some speculations on how African American
students and scholars might avoid incorporating Eurocentric biases
into their own work. Since 1980 Asante has amended his definition
several times, so that recent formulations are vastly more
imaginative than his original statement. His second book, The
Afrocentric Idea (1987), was a creative and in some respects
brilliant but rambling theoretical work, much influenced by the
revolution in "critical theory" that occurred in
American intellectual life during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
* * *
My purpose is to show that Afrocentrism is not a
self-contained tradition, recently developed by black zealots. The
phenomenon represents an attempt by black and white authors to
manipulate history and myth, poetry and art, folklore and
religious tradition, regardless of authorship, in ways sympathetic
to African peoples. Despite the fulminations of ethno-chauvinists
and other prejudiced persons, it remains a fact that the
contributions of white scholars, like Boas, Malinowski, and
Herskovits, were fundamental tot hat complex of ideas that we
designate to days as Afrocentrism.
Students of African and African American
history have long appreciated the irony that much of what we now
call Afrocentrism was developed during the 1930s by the Jewish
American scholar Melville Herskovits. It is impossible to deny
Herskovits's influence on such universally regarded scholars as
August Meier, Roger Abraham. Sterling Stuckey, and Robert Ferris
Thompson. . . .
In his widely read work on African American
music, Blues People (published under his old name LeRoi
Jones), Baraka footnoted and promulgated the Herskovits claim that
the African past was of fundamental importance to the present and
future status of African Americans.
* * *
Although "Afrocentrism" was not
invented until the 1960s, the idea of discussing African American
culture as a survival of African culture was well established in
sociological and anthropological literature before the Second
World War. The idea that African Americans were essentially
African, and that the solutions to their problems must be
discovered within a Pan-African context is nothing new.
Furthermore, Afrocentrism, although not always under that name,
has been a factor in recent African American scholarship and
culture theory, even among scholars who have eschewed or
disparaged the term.
* * *
In the Signifying Monkey (1988), [Henry
Louis] Gates identified himself with positions that were
unequivocally Afrocentric and that strikingly reflected the
influences of Herskovits and art historian Robert Farris Thompson.
Viewed from the perspective of his most
influential work, the Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates
appears to be a traditional Afrocentrist in the anthropological
mode. He resuscitates the Herskovits legacy of the 1930s,
contributing to the idea that black American culture is
essentially West African. In addition, he has become the
unchallenged interpreter and the principle raconteur of black
metropolitan life, reveling with obviously sincere delight in the
colorful cabaret of African American arts and entertainment --
arguing consistently for their Africanity.
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Inadvertently African slavery in the
New World satisfied the precondition for the emergence of
a new African culture, a truly Pan-African culture
fashioned as a colorful weave of linguistic,
institutional, metaphysical, and formal threads. What
survived this fascinating process was the most useful and
the most compelling of the fragments at hand.
Afro-American culture is an African culture with a
difference as signified by the catalysts of English,
Dutch, French, Portuguese, or Spanish languages and
cultures, which informed the precise structures that each
discrete New World Pan-African culture consumed. |
Sterling Stuckey, like Henry Louis Gates,
represents a continuation of the Herskovits tradition in
Afrocentric studies. the fundamental assumption of Stuckey's
widely influential work, Slave Culture (1987), is essentially the
same as that of Gates in Signifying Monkey. Both view African
American culture as an African culture, which came into being as a
process of fusing numerous African cultures during the slavery
period. Like Gates, Stuckey insists on "the centrality of the
African past to the African in America," and asserts that a
new African culture emerged out of the fusion of African cultural
forms that were imported into the Americas.
Like Gates, Herkovits, and Malinowski, Stuckey
is convinced that this new culture was Pan-African and, like
Gates, he is willing to entertain very seriously the proposition
that "black Americans today are basically African in culture.
Source: Wilson J. Moses.
"Introduction." Afrotopia:
The Roots of African American popular History. Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
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Books by Cain Hope Felder
Troubling Biblical Waters:
Race, Class, and Family /
Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation
The
African Heritage Study Bible /
Race,
Racism and the Biblical Narratives /
Proclamation
 |
Cain Hope
Felder
Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at
Howard University, Cain Hope Felder was this year’s Alexander Thompson
Memorial Lecturer.
"Afrocentrism means
reestablishing Africa and its descendants as centers
of value." |
Afrocentricity-- Definition & Problems
Afrocentricity is the idea that Africa and
persons of African descent must be seen as proactive subjects
within history, rather than passive objects of Western history.
Afrocentrism means reestablishing Africa and its
descendants as centers of value, without in any way demeaning
other people and their historical contributions to world
civilization. . . . Several
of us in the biblical field have adopted the term as a way to
describe our understanding of the task of interpreting the Bible
in a manner that contrasts with the standard treatment of Africa
by Eurocentric exegetes. . . .
Nevertheless, those of us who wish to advance
multiculturalism and a kind of Afrocentrism as corrective
historiography must beware of certain pitfalls.
The following is a list of traps into which number of
excessive or sensationalist proponents of multiculturalism and
Afrocentrism have fallen.
A. Demonizing
categorically all white people, without careful differentiation
between persons of goodwill who are allies or potential allies and
those white adversaries who consciously and systematically
perpetuate racism.
B. Replacing
Eurocentrism with an equally hierarchical, gender-insensitive, and
racially exclusive “centrism” based on a new fantastic
mythology in which one group of people or another claims to be, by
virtue of race or ethnicity, “the chosen people,” whether
Jews, blacks, or Asians. An
example is the dubious notion of Africans as “sun people” and
Europeans as “ice people” (see Welsing, Jefferies, and other
melanin theoreticians).
C. Adopting
multiculturalism as a curricular alternative that eliminates,
marginalizes, or vilifies European heritage to the point that
Europe epitomizes all the evil in the world; this results in a
balkanization of ethnic studies.
D. Not
differentiating between the different types of multiculturalism
and Afrocentrism that exist.
Here are both gross overreactions and factually
incorrect material that is bad history and bad scholarship, and
will ultimately be counterproductive, for it offends more than it
enlightens. These are
but some of the pitfalls or dangers in the “cultural wars”
that not only impede progress but obscure the important
constructive goals of getting faculty and students to think
critically and inclusively as we forge a new sense of common
Christian identity or even shared citizenship, irrespective of
race, gender, or class.
* * * *
*
Source: Cain Hope Felder,
"Afrocentrism, the Bible, and the Politics of
Difference." The Princeton Seminary
Bulletin (
1994) Volume XV,
Number 2.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
16 February 2012
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