Afrocentricity

The concept of Afrocentricity has its theoretical origins in a work by Molefi Kete Asante titled Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. It has been argued that Afrocentricity, as a perspective that stresses the centrality of African views, values, and agency in the study of African people and the world historical process, was present before Asante's initiative. Indeed, Asante pays homage to his intellectual predecessors such as Maria Stewart, Martin Delaney, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Cheikh Anta Diop, who stress race and cultural consciousness, and commitment and social criticism. Also during the 1960s, Black studies scholars and activist/intellectuals in general called for a Black perspective and a Black frame of reference. Asante refers especially to Kawaida philosophy by Maulana Karenga, professor of Africana Studies and creator of the pan-African holiday Kwanzaa, as key in the development of his theoretical project.

But it was Asante who, building on these and earlier sources and concepts, developed Afrocentricity as a coherent theoretical paradigm and methodology for doing Black/Africana studies. Moreover, he established institutional and intellectual space to nurture and develop Afrocentric scholars and scholarship. In this regard, as chair of the Department of African American Studies at Temple [Page 73]University, he created the first Ph.D. program in Black studies and initiated the Temple School of Afrocentric Thought, which became the Temple University Department of African American Studies.

Asante had lectured and written in the late 1970s on the importance of an Afrocentric orientation to data, and of interpreting African realities from an African perspective. But with Afrocentricity, he laid out the basic tenets of his intellectual project. In this work, he pays homage to his intellectual predecessors and calls for an emancipatory thrust away from Eurocentric notions of reality and a move to critical “groundedness” in African culture and effective engagement with African views, values, and ideals. This places African ideas at the center of any analysis of African culture, and it is this “centeredness” that provides the hub and hinge upon which this framework turns. It also treats Africans as active subjects of history, rather than objects within it or passive victims of it.

Asante has posited five fundamental and distinguishing characteristics of the Afrocentric idea: location, subject-place, cultural validity, lexical refinement, and historical revision. By location, Asante means groundedness in African culture and history. This translates as a critical, broad, and in-depth understanding of African history and culture, and it avoids Eurocentric or other diminished and diminishing conceptions of African life, initiatives, and achievements. It is this intellectual space that defines the initiative of Afrocentricity. What matters are not data themselves, but the interpretation of data from a given standpoint. Therefore, Africana studies is not to be defined simply by curricular focus and inclusion, but also (and indispensably) by an orientation to data, that is, one that reflects a critical groundedness in African culture and history.

The second defining feature of the Afrocentric idea stresses the importance of “subject-place,” that is, viewing Africans as subjects rather than objects in the historical process. In particular, they must be posited and engaged as the subject and source of their own history. Critical Black studies appreciates and foregrounds the agency of Africans, their initiatives, voices, and assertion in the world. Asante's concept of subject-place combines his stress on location or orientation with agency of history, the latter meaning that Africans are primary purveyors, rather than being passive witnesses or victims of history.

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