We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism - Hardcover

Walker, Clarence E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195095715 ISBN 13: 9780195095715

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Afrocentrism has been a controversial but popular movement in schools and universities across America, as well as in black communities. But in We Can't Go Home Again, historian Clarence E. Walker puts Afrocentrism to the acid test, in a thoughtful, passionate, and often blisteringly funny analysis that melts away the pretensions of this "therapeutic mythology."
As expounded by Molefi Kete Asante, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and others, Afrocentrism encourages black Americans to discard their recent history, with its inescapable white presence, and to embrace instead an empowering vision of their African (specifically Egyptian) ancestors as the source of western civilization. Walker marshals a phalanx of serious scholarship to rout these ideas. He shows, for instance, that ancient Egyptian society was not black but a melange of ethnic groups, and questions whether, in any case, the pharaonic regime offers a model for blacks today, asking "if everybody was a King, who built the pyramids?" But for Walker, Afrocentrism is more than simply bad history--it substitutes a feel-good myth of the past for an attempt to grapple with the problems that still confront blacks in a racist society. The modern American black identity is the product of centuries of real history, as Africans and their descendants created new, hybrid cultures--mixing many African ethnic influences with native and European elements. Afrocentrism replaces this complex history with a dubious claim to distant glory.
"Afrocentrism offers not an empowering understanding of black Americans' past," Walker concludes, "but a pastiche of 'alien traditions' held together by simplistic fantasies." More to the point, this specious history denies to black Americans the dignity, and power, that springs from an honest understanding of their real history.

About this title

About the Author

Clarence E. Walker is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Deromanticizing Black History and A Rock in a Weary Land. He lives in Davis, California.

Reviews

University of California history professor Walker takes on the controversial subject of Afrocentrism, maintaining that it is a therapeutic mythology that turns Eurocentrism on its ear and has little to do with the academic rigors of history. He traces it back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century efforts to answer racist historical and anthropological theories. He points to early arguments among philosophers and historians about the various contributions of racial groups, which discounted black Africans' and African Americans' contributions. He examines the negritude movement, Afrocentrism's intellectual forebear, as a reaction to colonialism that emphasized differences based on culture. Afrocentrism, however, attributes racial differences to biology, ascribing all virtues to blacks and all vices to whites. Because it centers Western civilization in Egyptian culture, Afrocentrism has become "Eurocentrism in blackface." The dangers of Afrocentrism lie in its neglect of black African descendants and its shortcomings as a platform for the future. Walker also takes to task the current rightward-leaning American politics that advocates so-called color blindness, "a form of disavowal," he says, of America's racist past. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Like Stephen Howe's Afrocentrism (LJ 5/15/98) and Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa (LJ 2/1/96), this book is a discourse on the historiography of "Afrocentrism." In this boldly conceived and well-executed analysis, Walker (history, Univ. of California, Davis) basically questions Afrocentrism as a form of historical consciousness. He argues that it is based on "European romantic racialism" and is a "therapeutic mythology" designed to restore the self-esteem of black Americans damaged and disoriented by "Eurocentrism." Like Howe, Walker critically analyzes, and in some cases debunks, "truth claims" (e.g., ancient Egypt and not Greece as the progenitor of Western civilization) in the writings of leading proponents of Afrocentrism like Molefi Asante, John H. Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Maulana Karenga. He equates Afrocentrism with white conservatives' views of black Americans' problems and sees Afrocentrism as a form of "Totalitarian groupthink" within the context of contemporary black political and cultural politics. This fantasy or "Afromessianism" as he renames it is dangerous for even black Americans today and poses a threat to cross-racial alliances. Intriguing and challenging, this work will appeal to scholars and students of African American studies and race relations in America. Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Lib., Long Beach
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195095715
• ISBN 13: 9780195095715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208