See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/268148430

Afrocentricity Published in the Encyclopedia of Identity

Chapter · January 2010

CITATIONS READS
0 5,249

2 authors, including:

Samuel Burbanks
University of Cincinnati
5 PUBLICATIONS 1 CITATION

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

African STEM View project

Biological Necessity of an African Centered Social Support Program in Education View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Samuel Burbanks on 11 November 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Afrocentricity
Afrocentricity

Afrocentricity is the critical analysis and interpretation of culture, economy, history, language,
philosophy, politics, and society from a conceptual, methodological, and theoretical framework
that centers Africa and privileges the agency of Africans and persons of African descent.
Afrocentricity is a critical and reflexive response to the production and reproduction of
knowledge that absolutely privileges the peoples, cultures, thoughts, and experiences of Europe.
After a brief review of the origins of Afrocentricity, this entry further defines the concept and
discusses its role in education and the social sciences.

Origins

The theory of Afrocentricity was developed by Temple University professor Molefi Asante, who
articulated its fullest expression in his germinal texts Afrocentricity and The Afrocentric Idea.
Although the theoretical expression of Afrocentricity is credited to Asante, the roots of the idea
of Afrocentricity lie within the protean strands of Africana social and political thought,
particularly with such 19th-century figures as Edward Wilmont Blyden, Martin Delany, Henry
Highland Garnett, and Mary Ann Shadd and such 20th-century personalities as Aimé Césaire,
Cheikh Anta Diop, Marcus Garvey, Na'im Akbar, and Maulana Karenga. Indeed, it was none
other than the intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois who first used a variant of the term Afrocentricity—
Afrocentrism —in 1961 to describe the critical principle informing hisEncyclopedia Africana
project.

Definition

Afrocentricity is not a single monolithic theory of knowledge but rather constitutes a gathering
space for multiple theoretical orientations—from the Africology of Asante to the Kemetic
theories advanced by Jacob Carruthers—that focus on African agency, culture, history,
philosophy, and society in an effort to reconstruct a global African identity and subjectivity.

In efforts to explain the raison d’être of Afrocentricity, some researchers examine the history of
chattel slavery in the Americas and the processes by which Europeans marginalized and negated
the agency of Africans and the histories of Africa. The narrative arc of this line of argument
begins with the processes by which slave masters invalidated and deemed illegitimate the
cultures, histories, and thoughts of Africa and every vestige of the African past that a captive
African might have tried to hold on to and maintain in the face of captivity. The first step in this
process was the removal of Africans from their physical center, the continent of Africa.
Dislocated from Africa, Africans were relocated to various lands in the Americas where the
process of dislocation and decentering continued. Previously grounded or centered in Africa,
Africans were introduced to and forced to accept a new center. African names were replaced
with European names. African spiritual practices and beliefs were dislocated, and some variants
were relocated within hybridized forms of European Christianity. African languages were
deemed inferior in relation to those of various European colonizers and enslavers. African
values, habits, and ways of life were replaced by the “centricity” of Europe in service to, and in
support of, the imperial/colonial efforts of Europe. Folkways, mores, and norms that were
developed from an African center and worked for sustaining

― 13 ―
and advancing Africa and Africans were negated and marginalized by Europeans in order to
further develop Europe and European progress. This intricate and complex process had the
corollary effect of arresting Africa's development.

Afrocentrists are involved in a reconstructive effort that places Africans at the center in an
attempt to reconnect them with the traditions, customs, norms, and ways of life that
predominated for African people for thousands of years prior to contact and domination by
Europe. Thus, Afrocentricity can be viewed as a form of resistance to Eurocentric hegemony and
domination. What Afrocentricity is not is Eurocentrism in reverse. Afrocentrists do not seek to
impose an African-centered worldview on other peoples or to posit that it is the only and
exclusive framework for legitimate knowledge production. Rather, Afrocentricity is a theory of
knowledge through which proponents seek to inform and educate African people and, by
extension, all people about the cultures, histories, philosophies, and traditions that Africans have
and continue to produce.

Afrocentricity and Education

Afrocentricity critically informed the educational and political philosophies of Black students at
higher educational institutions in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Informed
by the modern Black freedom struggles in Africa and throughout the Black world that emerged
in the last half of the 20th century, Black youth in the late 1960s and 1970s began to enter
college and demand an educational curriculum that reflected African contributions to world
history and civilization. Students argued that Eurocentrism served as the guiding principle for
every discipline offered at the university. The disciplines of biology, chemistry, economics,
history, linguistics, law, philosophy, politics, and religion privileged the peoples, cultures, and
ideas of Europe. An important example of this, the students noted, was that Pythagoras, not the
Black Egyptians from which he studied under for 21 years, is credited with the discovery of what
is now called the Pythagorean theorem. Although the origins of humanity lie in Africa and the
Egyptians were prolific chroniclers of history, Herodotus is conferred the title of the “Father of
History.” Columbus is credited with the discovery of America despite the presence of people
there when he arrived and despite the fact that the Chinese and Africans had established trade
with the Americas hundreds of years before Columbus's voyage. These were but a few of the
critical corrections that Black activist college students sought to remedy by establishing forms of
African-centered education.
This awakening of an Afrocentric consciousness was also expressed beyond the confines of
higher education. In African American communities throughout the United States, parents of
Black children sought to fill in the vast blanks left by a European-centered public education with
recourse to African-centered curricula whereby Africans and people of African descent are
treated as the subjects of history rather than objects. In addition to filling in the blanks, these
parents wanted a measure of control over what their children learned and how they were
socialized. Black parents wanted a cultural grounding in their children's social development that
was contrary to the Eurocentric form of socialization, which emphasized the individual,
individual self-actualization, and narrow self-interest. Black parents advocated for a more
African-centered communal form of socialization where the group and community are important.
In 1972, the Council of Independent Black Institutions was formed to serve as a broad-based
organization consisting of schools dedicated to correcting the deficiencies of existing forms of
Eurocentric education and to implementing African-centered curricula and pedagogy.

In private Black educational institutions, the philosophy of the Nguzu Saba or Seven Principles
is used to guide and critically inform instruction. The seven principles are unity, self-
determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity,
and faith. It is the goal of these schools to instill these principles in students, along with the
requisite knowledge developed within an African-centered educational framework, in order to
prepare Black students for advanced education at the collegiate level and to facilitate the
development of conscious and ethically motivated people who are dedicated and committed to
improving Black communities and the African world. This serves as one of the educational aims
of Afrocentrists.

― 14 ―

Afrocentricity and the Social Sciences

In the United States, social, political, and economic power is asymmetrically distributed among
racial and ethnic groups. Arguably, these asymmetries of power result from the history and
lingering effects of White supremacy, which was foundational to the origins and development of
the United States. These power configurations and their resulting social effects are the formative
material that informs the research and teaching programs of many social scientists. In addition,
the psychological problems that result from these historic and contemporary power arrangements
also play a significant role in forming the research agenda of social scientists.

Since the inception and formalization of the social sciences in the modern academy, the
intellectual protocols of Europe have served as the source and guiding norms informing the
definitions, theories, and methods of the various social science disciplines. This situation
perpetuates European hegemony and African abnormality, as European culture serves as the
model and basis for all social life; forms of life that deviate from these norms are thereby
deemed illegitimate and pathological. Moreover, this situation has the effect of enabling the
construction of social reality that maintains the asymmetric relations of power, position, and
privilege in favor of Whites over and against Blacks.
 Afrocentrists redefine the fields of the social sciences by providing new models and conceptions
of social life and ways of human being and belonging that relate to the historical and
contemporary centrality of Africa, that theorize from an agential point of view informed by the
intellectual traditions of Africa, and that facilitate the healthy development and integration of the
African and persons of African descent. An Afrocentric social science privileges the individual
within community. For example, healing, whether individual or collective, is properly
understood as a community event. Therefore, the Afrocentric approach would privilege a model
of healing that is communal in scale and scope. This does not mean that the individual is
forgotten and that the individual does not have a part to play in his or her own wellness, but
rather the individual is not absolutely isolated and is critically linked to a larger social and
cultural collective. This also entails that the individual is guided in a process of reflection and
conscious awareness of how a particular issue is connected to the histories of African denial and
denigration, choices structured in formations of dominance, and effects that are individualand
collective. In essence, educators supporting Afrocentricity in the social sciences attempt to
restore the African self in an integral and holistic fashion for the betterment of the health and
well-being of the entire African community.

The Future of Afrocentricity

Since its formal inception, Afrocentricity has had tremendous effects on education, on various
social and civic institutions, and on cultural life in the United States, Africa, and throughout the
African diaspora. Afrocentrists have developed robust and complex theoretical and
methodological frameworks, and Afrocentricity now holds a dominant position within the field
of Africana Studies in higher educational institutions throughout the United States. Despite some
setbacks as a result of a series of public controversies in the 1980s and 1990s and internal
disagreements at its main institutional home in the United States, Temple University,
Afrocentricity remains a vibrant and contested field of knowledge. As such, it promises to
continue to make significant contributions in the production of new knowledge anchored in
African agency and centered on and in Africa.

Corey D. B. Walker and Samuel Burbanks IV 10.4135/9781412979306.n6

View publication stats