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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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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."