Afronography

Afronography is a method of recording and writing the African experience from an Afrocentric perspective. As a method of ascertaining the condition or state of an event, person, or text related to African people, Afronography projects both an ethical and an evaluative dimension. In its ethical dimension, it is concerned with the nature of what is in the best interest of the African community specifically and the world community generally. The evaluative dimension allows the Afronographer to discern the usefulness of an event, person, or text in the search for truth. In both dimensions, Afronography seeks to understand the characteristics that accompany certain positions, hence, positionalities. The idea is that all positions carry with them certain obvious and not so obvious characteristics that allow a viewer, reader, locator to determine the extent of the influence of those characteristics on the position. In one sense this is a utilitarian function. Utility in an epistemological sense is related to the character of the proof discovered in the qualitative environment.

Establishing the nature and extent of social, critical, and cultural positionalities by employing such terms as dislocations, distortions, simplifications, blurs, distances, omissions, and misidentifications within the context of ethics and evaluation creates opportunities for stating more clearly and precisely the role of Africans in a given situation. Each movement away from Afrocentricity is considered a way of being out of location, and the Afronographer grapples with this in the writing of any particular experience.

Afronography seeks to determine what it is to know something. There are four approaches used by Afronography: historical, experiential, textual, and social. The aim of these approaches is to engage phenomena in such a way that it becomes possible to determine the location of the agent, creator, operator, or subject. Thus, examples from history, science, art, and various other disciplines compete to mark the location of a phenomenon.

Among the questions being raised by Afronography are what forms of legitimation are necessary for this new method of viewing reality and what the nature is of any legitimacy that does not privilege the people who are being studied. Thus the questions naturally arise as to how to expand the work being done by Afronographers gratis, and what types of institutional structures would ensure the legitimation of this perspective. Clearly the established institutional fields do not support granting legitimacy to a methodological form that questions their lack of diversity. What then is the task of the Afronographer? The Afronographer says that it is to demonstrate that the African narrative [Page 76]can be understood within the context of any given situation so long as the African is not deprivileged as subject.

The Afronographer seeks to discover, argue, analyze, prove, challenge, describe, justify, or clarify some situation. This is done within the context of seeking what is true, describing human actions and products, and being respectful of all human situations. Respect is demonstrated in the Afronographer's accurate depictions, direct quotations, and highlighting contradictions. In Afronography, all analysis is based on the idea that explicit abstraction and generalization of data should concentrate on the issue of location. As the Afronographer is interested in understanding the role of the analyzed, the goal of Afronographic analysis is not antihumanist as it is in most purely statistical analyses (which seek to establish reliable frequencies and generalize from them to predict behavior).

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