The Afrocentric Idea

The Afrocentric Idea is Molefi Kete Asante's second salvo in a trilogy of books that includes Afrocentricity[Page 66](1980) and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990). In The Afrocentric Idea Asante articulates his simultaneously critically acclaimed and vigorously contested concept of Afrocentricity. Afrocentricity is, essentially, a critical theoretical framework that advocates analysis of African history and culture and, more generally, world history and culture from an African perspective. Afrocentrists assert that knowledge of classical and contemporary, continental and diasporic African history and culture is inextricable from and indispensable to any analysis or proper interpretation of Africa and Africans.

In a later book, The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Asante further develops the theory of Afrocentricity that he initiated in Afrocentricity (1980) by bringing it into critical dialogue with the Eurocentric tradition. This tradition extends from Greco-Roman civilization and culture through to contemporary thinkers such as Karl Popper, Edmund Husserl, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Thomas Kuhn. It is characterized, albeit often clandestinely, by the belief that the European way of viewing phenomena is not only the correct way to engage history and culture but also somehow universal, neutral, and normal. Asante asserts that Afrocentricity does not question the value and validity of the Eurocentric tradition within its context, within the life-worlds and limits of European culture and civilization. However, what Afrocentricity does take issue with is what European imperial expansion efforts have historically done and currently continue to do—obliterate and erase, censor and systematically deny African (and other non-European peoples') humanity and history, their culture and contributions to civilization. At the heart of the Afrocentric idea, then, is a radical rejection and constant critique of the established European imperial order. It is a view that critically assesses the past and present monocultural reality with the intent, literally, of creating a new, multicultural, multiperspectival, and multidimensional reality.

The Afrocentric Idea opens with a gentle nudging by Asante for his readers to come to terms with the fact that there are a multiplicity of views from which to analyze and experience phenomena, not only the European view, and certainly not the European imperial point of view. According to the nature of paradigm shifts pointed out by Popper and Kuhn, among others, Asante argues that the next great paradigm shift will involve the issues of cultural specificity and positionality. The Eurocentric paradigm theorists write and speak of changes in science and scientific culture without considering the sociohistorical reality of their perspectives, which are based on race, gender, and class.

According to Asante, human beings' historicity, their consciousness of their own and their ancestors' lived experiences and life struggles, is never neatly checked at the door like an overcoat at a dinner party, but it more often than not has a deep and abiding impact and influence on their thought and behavior (i.e., their concepts and categories of culture and their life practices). Because of the protracted and often hidden nature of European hegemony in modern life, that is, what scholars such as Maulana Karenga and Molefi Kete Asante have called the progressive Europeanization of human consciousness, many European and Europeantrained theorists are conceptually incarcerated. To combat conceptual incarceration and the internalization of imperial thought and practices (e.g., racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism, among others), Asante advances centeredness and agency as the two central categories of the Afrocentric idea as a conceptual system and method.

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