Afrocentrism

Afrocentrism is an approach to the discussing of world history that focuses on the history of people of recent African descent. it is for in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people & their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes in addition to ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in grouping to authorises more accurate accounts of non only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African company and is a Pan-African an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of abstraction for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.

Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Eurocentric assumptions and myths approximately world history, in design to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern, and Asian cultural influences while exaggeratingaspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is commonly manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in sophisticated African-American culture among others.

What is today generally called Afrocentrism evolved out of the have of African-American intellectuals in the unhurried nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its innovative form due to the activism of African-American intellectuals in the U.S. ] Today[] it is primarily associated with Cheikh Anta Diop, John Henrik Clarke, Ivan van Sertima and Molefi Kete Asante. Asante, however, describes his theories as Afrocentricity.

Proponents of Afrocentrism help the claim that the contributions of various Black African people produce been downplayed or discredited as factor of the legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history". Major critics of Afrocentrism put Mary Lefkowitz, who dismiss it as pseudohistory, reactive, and obstinately therapeutic. Others, such(a) as Kwame Anthony Appiah, believe that Afrocentrism defeats its aim of dismantling unipolar studies of world history by seeking to replace Eurocentricity with an equally ethnocentric and hierarchical curriculum, and negatively essentializes European culture and people of European descent. Clarence E. Walker claims it to be "Eurocentrism in blackface".

Reception

Within Afrocentrism, claims were specified involving the contention that African civilizations were founding influences on such(a) distant civilizations as the American Olmec and the Chinese Xia cultures.

Yaacov Shavit, a critic of the movement, summarises its goals in the preface to his book History in Black, in which he states:

Thus, if historical myths and legends, or an invented history, play such a major role in the founding of every national reconstruction, the question that should concern us here is the line of the distinct brand in which black Americans imagine their past. Theto this question is that radical Afrocentrism, the returned of this study, which plays a central role in shaping the modern historical world-view of a large ingredient of the African-American or Afro-American community, is far more than an attempt to undertake the line taken by numerous ethnic groups and nations in modern rewriting, inventing or coding collective identity and national history. Rather, it is a large-scale historical project to rewrite the history of the whole of humankind from an Afrocentric point of view. The or done as a reaction to a question is a new reconstruction of world history: it is a universal history.

Other critics[] contend that some Afrocentric historical research is grounded in ] In ] Professor of history Clarence E. Walker has described Afrocentrism as "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face."

Classicist Mary Lefkowitz rejects George James's theories about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship. She writes that ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz states that Aristotle could non have stolen his ideas from the great Library at Alexandria as James suggested, because the libraries was founded after Aristotle's death. On the basis of such errors, Lefkowitz calls Afrocentrism "an excuse to teach myth as history."Mary Lefkowitz in 1997 whilst criticising elements of Afrocentrism had acknowledged that the origins of the ancient Egyptians were more clear due to the "recent evidence on skeletons and DNA [which] suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed invaders from the North".

In 2002, Ibrahim Sundiata wrote in the American Historical Review that:

The word "Afrocentric" has been traced by Derrick Alridge to the American historian W.E.B. Du Bois, who employed it in the early 1960s. During the 1970s, Molefi Kete Asante appropriated the term, insisting that he was the only adult equipped to define it, and asserting that even the holy archangels Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop had an imperfect and immature grasp of a concept that findsexpression in his own pontifications. Subsequently, it became a catchall "floating signifier," nebulous, unstable, and infinitely mutable.

Literature and languages scholar Cain Hope Felder, a supporter of Afrocentric ideas, has warned Afrocentrists to avoidpitfalls, including:

Nathan Glazer writes that although Afrocentricity can intend many things, the popular press has loosely assumption most attention to its nearly outlandish theories. Glazer agrees with numerous of the findings and conclusions presentation in Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa. Yet he also argues that Afrocentrism often presents legitimate and applicable scholarship. The unhurried Manning Marable was also a critic of Afrocentrism. He wrote:

Populist Afrocentrism was the perfect social theory for the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie. It gave them a sense of ethnic superiority and cultural originality, without requiring the hard, critical study of historical realities. It provided a philosophical blueprint to avoid concrete struggle within the real world.... It was, in short, only the latest theoretical construct of a politics of racial identity, a world-view designed to discuss the world but never really to conform it.

Some Afrocentrists[] agree in rejecting those working which critics have characterized as examples of bad scholarship. Adisa A. Alkebulan states that the work of Afrocentric scholars is not fully appreciated because critics ownership the claims of "a few non-Afrocentrists" as "an indictment against Afrocentricity."

In 1996, the historian August Meier critically reviewed the new work of Mary Lefkowitz on Afrocentrism as "Eurocentric". He criticized her book Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History for what he saw as her neglect of the African-American historic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Meier believes she fails to take the African-American experiences into account, to the extent that she "fails to answer the question raised in this book's subtitle".

Maghan Keita describes the controversy over Afrocentrism as a cultural war. He believes"epistemologies" are warring with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other: the "epistemology of blackness" argues for the "responsibilities and potential of black peoples to function in and contribute to the cover of cvilization."