Afrocentricity
Afrocentricity is a philosophical paradigm that emphasizes the centrality and agency of the African person within a historical and cultural context. As such it is a rejection of the historic marginality and racial otherness often present in the ordinary paradigm of European racial domination. What is more, Afrocentrists articulate a counterhegemonic or domination resisting view that questions the application of epistemological ideas rooted in the cultural experiences of Europe to Africans or others as if these ideas were universal principles. In this sense, Afrocentricity is a critique of domination that aggressively establishes the agency of Africans in their own communication sphere. This critique may be discovered in the type of language, art forms, expressive styles, arguments, economics, or social ideas within an interactive situation. Thus, the Afrocentric idea is critical to any behavioral activity that involves Africans or people of African descent. One cannot very easily engage in communication study of Africans without some appreciation of the authentic voices of Africans. This implies, of course, a serious study of the deep structure of African philosophical thought.
Necessitated by the conditions of history that have removed Africans from their traditional cultural, expressive, philosophical, and religious base, the Afrocentric idea in communication seeks to reposition Africans in the center of their own historical experiences rather than on the margins of European experiences. In essence, two political situations removed Africans from their own terms. First, the enslavement of African people brought about a massive physical and cultural dislocation of millions of Africans. Such a large-scale movement did not have mere displacement implications but more profound implications for how Africans would communicate out of the new reality and what Africans would say about their new reality. Thus, it was both how and what that mattered in the process of communication among Africans in the Americas. The second political situation was the colonizing of the continent of Africa itself, which left people on the continent but already endangered in their cultural, psychological, and cognitive selves. Thus, the disassembly of African ideas, ideals, standards, and methods was fundamental to the making of both enslaved Africans and colonized Africans.
The Afrocentrist’s claim that Africans were removed from their own terms in expressive and
religious ways is an existential claim based on the reality of the European slave trade and the imperial colonization of Africa. When Africans were forbidden to speak their own languages, to dress in their own clothes, and in some cases, to use their own names, they were in the midst of the turmoil of dislocation. Those who were also separated from their familiar physical and environmental contexts were further alienated from their own cultural terms.
The quest for Afrocentric location, that is, a place from which the African can view reality and phenomena associated with reality from the standpoint of Africans, is a liberating journey. One experiences the quest in the language of the best orators in the African American community. They are forever on the road to bringing into the arena of now the language and color of the African reality. Their voices, words, and cadences are those of Africans who are discovering their way back to the center of their own histories. Marginality is a place, but it is not a stable place from which to seek redefinition, relocation, and centering of one’s perspective.
This is a philosophical turn that is essential for conceptualizing Africans as subjects or agents within the communication process. If Africans are not subjects—empowered actors—in the situation, then the old patterns of marginality and peripherality are maintained; the interaction takes the form of one party taking an active role against another, more passive party, rather than subject-to-subject communication, in which both parties are agents who speak from the position of self-activation, of being in charge of one’s self. Consequently, if the subject-to-subject pattern does not adhere, then the communication cannot be authentic.
In its attempt to shift discourse about African phenomena from ideas founded in European constructs to a more centered perspective, Afrocentricity announces itself as a form of antiracist, antipatriarchal, and antisexist ideology that is innovative, challenging, and capable of creating exciting ways to acquire and express knowledge. The denial of the exploitative expression of race, gender, and class often found in older ideas about knowledge is at once controversial and a part of the evolving process of developing a new way of thinking about knowledge. Afrocentricity confronts the marginality of Africans and critiques European patriarchy and sexism as a part of the baggage of
the hegemonic tendencies frequently found in Western communication. Like the double ax of the African god Shango, Afrocentricity strikes going and coming. On one hand, it challenges African communicators to come from the margins of European reality and to claim their own centered space. On the other hand, in its emphasis on each person’s assuming agency and not being trampled on or victimized, Afrocentricity offers a liberating space for the struggle against all forms of oppression.
Origins
The origin of Afrocentricity as a concept is traced to a quartet of books written by Molefi Kete Asante between 1979 and 2008: Afrocentricity; The Afrocentric Idea; Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge; and An Afrocentric Manifesto. Ama Mazama’s The Afrocentric Paradigm and L’Imperatif Afrocentrique, which appeared in 2003 and 2005, respectively, added immensely to the theoretical and intellectual development of the theory. Afrocentricity became a discourse that thrust the concept of agency into the intellectual arena as a perspective whose core was the interpretation and explanation of phenomena from the standpoint of Africans as subjects rather than victims or objects.
In order to return to an authentic consciousness rooted in self-respect, affirmation, and dignity, it was necessary for African people to see themselves in the midst of their own history and not as in the margins of Europe. Viewing oneself as an agent means also knowing one’s history. Someone who does not know his or her own history will speak with the wrong metaphors and appeal to inauthentic events and phenomena to make a communication case.
The Afrocentrist believes that it is essential to return to the classical civilizations of Africa for necessary models of argument, construction, encounter, and ethics, in much the same way as Westerners had harkened back to the likes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus, the return to a discussion of the ancient African civilizations of Egypt (2900 BCE to 330 BCE) and Nubia (750 BCE to 340 CE) during the classical periods was essential for an appreciation of the role that Africans and Africa played in human behavior, communication, rhetoric, and world history.
Afrocentrists were the first to see the overthrow in the African’s mind of European domination by a return to classical Africa. Besides its acceptance of classical Africa, Afrocentricity was grounded in the historical reality of African people through the presentation of key intellectual ideas. The point is that the Afrocentric idea in communication was not merely stuck in the fertile ground of ancient philosophies of Imhotep (2700 BCE), Ptahhotep (2414 BCE), Kagemni (2300 BCE), Merikare (1990 BCE), or Duauf (1340 BCE); rather the theorists saw these philosophers as departure positions, not destinations. They wrote on themes such as aging, books, the value of speaking well, and protocol. For example, it was important for the Afrocentrist to contend that the Eurocentric view had become an ethnocentric view, which elevated the European experience as universal and downgraded all others. For the Afrocentrist, it was clear that Afrocentricity was not the counterpoint to Eurocentricity but a particular perspective for analysis that did not seek to occupy all space and time, as Eurocentrism has often done. All human cultures must be centered, in fact, the subject of their own realities.
Key Points
In the Afrocentric view, the problem of location takes precedence over the topic or the data under consideration. Two methodological devices have emerged to assist in the construction of a new body of knowledge: reasonable plausibility, or believability based on careful consideration, and intelligent conclusion, or logical inference. Both are common terms used in a definite and precise sense to deal with the issue of historical, social, and cultural lacunae, or gaps, in many discourses on African people.
Afrocentrists contend that human beings cannot divest themselves of culture, whether participating in their own historical culture or that of some other group. A contradiction between history and perspective produces a kind of incongruity that is called decenteredness. Thus, when an African American speaks from the viewpoint of Europeans who came to the Americas on the Mayflower when Africans really came on slave ships, or when literary critics write of Africans as the Other, Afrocentrists claim that Africans are being peripheralized within their own narrative.
Metaphor of Location
Metaphors of location and dislocation—being centered or decentered from events, situations, texts, buildings, dreams, and literary works—are the principal tools of analysis. To be centered is to be located as an agent instead of as the Other. Such a critical shift in thinking has involved the explanation of psychological misorientation and disorientation, attitudes that affect Africans who consider themselves to be Europeans or who believe that it is impossible to be African and human. Severe forms of this psychological attitude have been labeled extreme misorientation by some Afrocentrists. Additional issues have been the influence of a centered approach to education, particularly as it relates to the revision of the American educational curriculum. Hundreds of dissertations and numerous books and articles have been written extending the idea of Afrocentricity in communication, architecture, social work, religion, politics, historical and cultural analysis, criminology, and philosophy.
Afrocentricity creates, among other things, a critique of human communication and social history in the search for a unique standing place for agency. Such an action is at once a liberalizing and a liberating event, marking both the expansion of consciousness and the freeing of the mind from hegemonic thinking. Therefore, Afrocentric communication theory raises the bar for an authentic relationship of equals in which African people are no longer viewed in the traditional Western manner as victims and objects.
Molefi Kete Asante
See also Black Feminist Epistemology; Critical Race Theory; Critical Rhetoric; Critical Theory; Interracial Communication; Neocolonialism; Postcolonial Theory; Power and Power Relations; Privilege; Racial Formation Theory; Whiteness Theory
Further Readings
Asante, M. K. (1990). Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Asante, M. K. (1998). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University.
Asante, M. K. (2003). Afrocentricity. Chicago: AAI Press. (Original work published 1980 by Amulefi Publishing, Buffalo, NY)
Asante, M. K. (2008). An Afrocentric manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Conyers, J. L., Jr. (2003). Afrocentricity and the academy: Essays on theory and practice. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Mazama, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Afrocentric paradigm. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Mazama, A. (2004). L’imperatif afrocentrique. Paris: Editions Menaibuc.
Ziegler, D. (1995). Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentricity: In praise and in criticism. Nashville, TN: Winston-Derek.
Afrocentricity is a philosophical paradigm that emphasizes the centrality and agency of the African person within a historical and cultural context. As such it is a rejection of the historic marginality and racial otherness often present in the ordinary paradigm of European racial domination. What is more, Afrocentrists articulate a counterhegemonic or domination resisting view that questions the application of epistemological ideas rooted in the cultural experiences of Europe to Africans or others as if these ideas were universal principles. In this sense, Afrocentricity is a critique of domination that aggressively establishes the agency of Africans in their own communication sphere. This critique may be discovered in the type of language, art forms, expressive styles, arguments, economics, or social ideas within an interactive situation. Thus, the Afrocentric idea is critical to any behavioral activity that involves Africans or people of African descent. One cannot very easily engage in communication study of Africans without some appreciation of the authentic voices of Africans. This implies, of course, a serious study of the deep structure of African philosophical thought.
Necessitated by the conditions of history that have removed Africans from their traditional cultural, expressive, philosophical, and religious base, the Afrocentric idea in communication seeks to reposition Africans in the center of their own historical experiences rather than on the margins of European experiences. In essence, two political situations removed Africans from their own terms. First, the enslavement of African people brought about a massive physical and cultural dislocation of millions of Africans. Such a large-scale movement did not have mere displacement implications but more profound implications for how Africans would communicate out of the new reality and what Africans would say about their new reality. Thus, it was both how and what that mattered in the process of communication among Africans in the Americas. The second political situation was the colonizing of the continent of Africa itself, which left people on the continent but already endangered in their cultural, psychological, and cognitive selves. Thus, the disassembly of African ideas, ideals, standards, and methods was fundamental to the making of both enslaved Africans and colonized Africans.
The Afrocentrist’s claim that Africans were removed from their own terms in expressive and
religious ways is an existential claim based on the reality of the European slave trade and the imperial colonization of Africa. When Africans were forbidden to speak their own languages, to dress in their own clothes, and in some cases, to use their own names, they were in the midst of the turmoil of dislocation. Those who were also separated from their familiar physical and environmental contexts were further alienated from their own cultural terms.
The quest for Afrocentric location, that is, a place from which the African can view reality and phenomena associated with reality from the standpoint of Africans, is a liberating journey. One experiences the quest in the language of the best orators in the African American community. They are forever on the road to bringing into the arena of now the language and color of the African reality. Their voices, words, and cadences are those of Africans who are discovering their way back to the center of their own histories. Marginality is a place, but it is not a stable place from which to seek redefinition, relocation, and centering of one’s perspective.
This is a philosophical turn that is essential for conceptualizing Africans as subjects or agents within the communication process. If Africans are not subjects—empowered actors—in the situation, then the old patterns of marginality and peripherality are maintained; the interaction takes the form of one party taking an active role against another, more passive party, rather than subject-to-subject communication, in which both parties are agents who speak from the position of self-activation, of being in charge of one’s self. Consequently, if the subject-to-subject pattern does not adhere, then the communication cannot be authentic.
In its attempt to shift discourse about African phenomena from ideas founded in European constructs to a more centered perspective, Afrocentricity announces itself as a form of antiracist, antipatriarchal, and antisexist ideology that is innovative, challenging, and capable of creating exciting ways to acquire and express knowledge. The denial of the exploitative expression of race, gender, and class often found in older ideas about knowledge is at once controversial and a part of the evolving process of developing a new way of thinking about knowledge. Afrocentricity confronts the marginality of Africans and critiques European patriarchy and sexism as a part of the baggage of
the hegemonic tendencies frequently found in Western communication. Like the double ax of the African god Shango, Afrocentricity strikes going and coming. On one hand, it challenges African communicators to come from the margins of European reality and to claim their own centered space. On the other hand, in its emphasis on each person’s assuming agency and not being trampled on or victimized, Afrocentricity offers a liberating space for the struggle against all forms of oppression.
Origins
The origin of Afrocentricity as a concept is traced to a quartet of books written by Molefi Kete Asante between 1979 and 2008: Afrocentricity; The Afrocentric Idea; Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge; and An Afrocentric Manifesto. Ama Mazama’s The Afrocentric Paradigm and L’Imperatif Afrocentrique, which appeared in 2003 and 2005, respectively, added immensely to the theoretical and intellectual development of the theory. Afrocentricity became a discourse that thrust the concept of agency into the intellectual arena as a perspective whose core was the interpretation and explanation of phenomena from the standpoint of Africans as subjects rather than victims or objects.
In order to return to an authentic consciousness rooted in self-respect, affirmation, and dignity, it was necessary for African people to see themselves in the midst of their own history and not as in the margins of Europe. Viewing oneself as an agent means also knowing one’s history. Someone who does not know his or her own history will speak with the wrong metaphors and appeal to inauthentic events and phenomena to make a communication case.
The Afrocentrist believes that it is essential to return to the classical civilizations of Africa for necessary models of argument, construction, encounter, and ethics, in much the same way as Westerners had harkened back to the likes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus, the return to a discussion of the ancient African civilizations of Egypt (2900 BCE to 330 BCE) and Nubia (750 BCE to 340 CE) during the classical periods was essential for an appreciation of the role that Africans and Africa played in human behavior, communication, rhetoric, and world history.
Afrocentrists were the first to see the overthrow in the African’s mind of European domination by a return to classical Africa. Besides its acceptance of classical Africa, Afrocentricity was grounded in the historical reality of African people through the presentation of key intellectual ideas. The point is that the Afrocentric idea in communication was not merely stuck in the fertile ground of ancient philosophies of Imhotep (2700 BCE), Ptahhotep (2414 BCE), Kagemni (2300 BCE), Merikare (1990 BCE), or Duauf (1340 BCE); rather the theorists saw these philosophers as departure positions, not destinations. They wrote on themes such as aging, books, the value of speaking well, and protocol. For example, it was important for the Afrocentrist to contend that the Eurocentric view had become an ethnocentric view, which elevated the European experience as universal and downgraded all others. For the Afrocentrist, it was clear that Afrocentricity was not the counterpoint to Eurocentricity but a particular perspective for analysis that did not seek to occupy all space and time, as Eurocentrism has often done. All human cultures must be centered, in fact, the subject of their own realities.
Key Points
In the Afrocentric view, the problem of location takes precedence over the topic or the data under consideration. Two methodological devices have emerged to assist in the construction of a new body of knowledge: reasonable plausibility, or believability based on careful consideration, and intelligent conclusion, or logical inference. Both are common terms used in a definite and precise sense to deal with the issue of historical, social, and cultural lacunae, or gaps, in many discourses on African people.
Afrocentrists contend that human beings cannot divest themselves of culture, whether participating in their own historical culture or that of some other group. A contradiction between history and perspective produces a kind of incongruity that is called decenteredness. Thus, when an African American speaks from the viewpoint of Europeans who came to the Americas on the Mayflower when Africans really came on slave ships, or when literary critics write of Africans as the Other, Afrocentrists claim that Africans are being peripheralized within their own narrative.
Metaphor of Location
Metaphors of location and dislocation—being centered or decentered from events, situations, texts, buildings, dreams, and literary works—are the principal tools of analysis. To be centered is to be located as an agent instead of as the Other. Such a critical shift in thinking has involved the explanation of psychological misorientation and disorientation, attitudes that affect Africans who consider themselves to be Europeans or who believe that it is impossible to be African and human. Severe forms of this psychological attitude have been labeled extreme misorientation by some Afrocentrists. Additional issues have been the influence of a centered approach to education, particularly as it relates to the revision of the American educational curriculum. Hundreds of dissertations and numerous books and articles have been written extending the idea of Afrocentricity in communication, architecture, social work, religion, politics, historical and cultural analysis, criminology, and philosophy.
Afrocentricity creates, among other things, a critique of human communication and social history in the search for a unique standing place for agency. Such an action is at once a liberalizing and a liberating event, marking both the expansion of consciousness and the freeing of the mind from hegemonic thinking. Therefore, Afrocentric communication theory raises the bar for an authentic relationship of equals in which African people are no longer viewed in the traditional Western manner as victims and objects.
Molefi Kete Asante
See also Black Feminist Epistemology; Critical Race Theory; Critical Rhetoric; Critical Theory; Interracial Communication; Neocolonialism; Postcolonial Theory; Power and Power Relations; Privilege; Racial Formation Theory; Whiteness Theory
Further Readings
Asante, M. K. (1990). Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Asante, M. K. (1998). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University.
Asante, M. K. (2003). Afrocentricity. Chicago: AAI Press. (Original work published 1980 by Amulefi Publishing, Buffalo, NY)
Asante, M. K. (2008). An Afrocentric manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Conyers, J. L., Jr. (2003). Afrocentricity and the academy: Essays on theory and practice. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Mazama, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Afrocentric paradigm. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Mazama, A. (2004). L’imperatif afrocentrique. Paris: Editions Menaibuc.
Ziegler, D. (1995). Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentricity: In praise and in criticism. Nashville, TN: Winston-Derek.
Last edited:
