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 [Page 25]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.

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