Class: The Afrocentric Paradigm
Written by: Rev. Renaldo McKenzie, PhD Student
Professor: Dr. Ama Mazama
Date: October 31, 2024
Topic: Presentation on Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity: How does Sara Balakrishnan Approach Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity? How does she differentiate between the two?
Recently, there was a discussion in one of the classes at Temple University in the Africology and African American Studies Department, about who is “Afrocentric” or not, based on various measure of what is employed by the student in his/her own understanding of the texts concerning the foundations of knowledge and the corruption of cultures which persist. In fact, what seem to have been unclear among the students was whether there was any difference between “Afrocentrism” and “Afrocentric”. Yet, no one mentioned “Afrocentrism”. Rather, the students, in my estimation, spoke of “Afrocentricity” as the highest political tradition of “Afrocentrism” or African liberation. Some students argued that Dubois was not “Afrocentric” and so too was Fanon because they were not centered on Africa and still relied on European traditions within their strategies. It was as if Dubois and Fanon were not significant because they were not “Afrocentric” enough. Regardless, what they were, was part of a tradition we call “Afrocentrism”.
Sarah Balakrishnan attempted to delineate between “Afrocentricity” and “Afrocentrism” in her article entitled, “Afrocentrism Revisited”, Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism”. She does not make the mistake of downplaying the contributions of any to our history. But discusses the history and development of Africa and its struggle for liberation within the historical. In a sense Balakrishnan attempted to reconcile the divide between those who advocated for one kind of liberation and “Africanism” or “Africanity” for another and brought clarity to the debate by suggesting where and when “Africanism” and its rich tradition begins: transcending “Afrocentricity” to considering the rich historical and political traditions and contributions towards African liberation beginning with the first evidence of African civilization.
Balakrishnan’s approach is macroscopic and broad or considers the general and the whole instead of looking at particulars or aspects of “African” reality to make the tradition and experience inclusive. Nevertheless, she makes a comparison between the whole/general that is “Afrocentrism” and the particular that is “Black Nationalism” and “Afrocentricity”. Balakrishnan splits up “Afrocentrism” into political traditions or movements such as “Black Nationalism”/Garveyism and “Afrocentricity” or the “Afrocentric” movement etc. In terms of describing “Afrocentrism” within the tradition or movement of “Black Nationalism”, Balakrishnan uses a Marxist notion of self to conceptualize how through strategies or systematic means, Africans became dispossessed of self. So, the repossession of self through self-discovery and developing a consciousness of resilience defined the black nationalists’ movements of the 19th and early twentieth century: Pan African Movement, Garveyism, Negritude, the Black Panther and (Independent) Movements. According to Balakrishnan,
In this sense, Afrocentrism belonged to a political tradition known as Black
nationalism, having formed one of its earliest variations. Unlike in the European mold, the nation of Black nationalism did not emerge technocratically with the modern state. Rather, on the collective level, Black nationalism has concerned the
African’s dispossession of the self: an ontological alienation consequent of the continuous subordination of Black life to capital, whether through slavery, colonization, or apartheid. In the pursuit of self-repossession (self-sovereignty), Black nationalism seeks to infuse Blackness with meaning and personhood, with liberty and destiny. Afrocentrism locates Africa as the necessary starting point for this project. From Africa, a vitality lay in its uncovered histories, in its resilient rituals and material cultures which—despite all manners of repression—persevered on both sides of the Atlantic, uniting a people otherwise consolidated only through sheer violence. In the words of Archie Mafeje, Africanity thus constitutes “a combative ontology.” Across a genealogy of struggle, extending from Pan-Africanism to Black Power, Black Consciousness, Negritude, and Garveyism, Afrocentrism has shaped Black politics around Africa’s provocative place as a praxis for resistance”.
In terms of describing “Afrocentrism” within the tradition of “Afrocentricity”, according to Sarah, “Afrocentricity” is part of an academic movement that started in universities in the US largely by Asante et al such as Karenga in the 1960s. Balakrishnan, leaves out Dubois’s contributions, and Asante’s role in developing or linking “Afrocentricity” to a paradigm in the 1980s. For Balakrishnan, while Afrocentrism is the political tradition of liberation, Afrocentricity is part of the rich tradition that is Afrocentrism and so too is the contributions of Fanon and Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Blyden, Baldwin, Morrison, Douglas and Garvey etc. Balakrishnan’s essay “revisits Afrocentrism as a foundation for the Black Radical Tradition. It argues that Afrocentrism presupposed the relationship between Blackness and Africa to be the central problem for emancipatory thought”.
It is this thread that has largely been debated among black/African Nationalists and scholars. The arguments surrounding what constitutes African values such as should black men marry white women? Should black people vote? Should black men have black Jesus? Are we still Marxists, Feminists and Postmodernists? Should we call ourselves Niggers, Negroes or the names given by our colonial masters or our African ancestors? Should we drive Tesla’s and wear Nike? Should we backslide and not go to church? Should we go back to Africa? For Bob Marley, he resorts to a new religion that is the “I and I” or Rastafari. Fanon had said we must do something revolutionary meaning starting from nothing or from scratch as “table rasas”. But that is defeatist and creates more abnormality as we cannot deny the reality of being which is bound up in who we are. We will create something new that is informed by what we now know of our own histories. Importantly, these rich debates, conversations and questions have defined our rich narratives which have contributed to a history that have created many forms that represent “Afrocentrism”.
For Balakrishnan, Afrocentricity is a form or aspect of Afrocentrism or represent a moment or a period and movement in Afrocentrism and History. Afrocentricity rose up in the 20th century as a challenge to institutional politics and included several waves from Diop Forensic applications deconstructing African civilizations to Dubois sociological studies and Afrocentric pronouncements of Africa to Asante’s philosophical applications within a scientific manner. Balakrishnan discusses the history of Afrocentricity from Edward Blyden to Asante, but then stated that Afrocentricity is a movement which started in US academic institutions in the 1980s. This seemed quite contradictory. Balakrishnan wrote in her essay that, “In the 1980s, the term “Afrocentrism” came to represent this school of inquiry following the 1980 publication of Afrocentricity by African-American scholar, Molefi Kete Asante.”
In her historical analysis of the development of Afrocentrism, Sarah Balakrishnana interprets Asante’s Afrocentricity as a period in our history that led to the reasserting of African identity by many adopting African names and styles and embracing African traditions and spirituality over Christianity.
According to Balakrishnan, “Born as Arthur Lee Smith, Asante adopted an African name in 1976 in place of his Anglo-American appellation—a ritual undertaken by Inheriting Black Studies thousands of Afrocentric practitioners, including Ron Everett (Maulana Karenga) and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). “The choosing of an African name [is] participatory, inasmuch as it contributes to the total rise of consciousness,” writes Asante in Afrocentricity. According to the text, Afrocentricity constituted “a philosophical perspective associated with the discovery, location, and actualizing of African agency within the context of history and culture.” It located Africa’s past as a necessary starting point for political and social freedom, not in the least because it provided the foundation for conceptualizing a free Africa as a prophetic horizon. Afrocentricity also emphasized the importance of cultural self-styling as a political practice. Re-adopting an African identity restored the protection of heritage and the burden of history to Black communities whose dehumanization, in the form of sale and commoditization, had demanded the disavowal of any essence beyond objecthood.
In this manner, Afrocentrists approached Africanity as a historical consciousness requiring specific embodied practices. From the 1960s-90s, Afrocentric teachings spread through grassroots political channels on the community level but remained closely tied to academic institutions. The arrival of Black Studies on American campuses transformed curricula into sites of controversy, indicted for the myriad ways that racial supremacy remained reified in their “objectivist” knowledge. Black Studies programs, especially in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, became vocal progenitors of a new African history built as a Eurocentric counterforce. Monographs of Afrocentrism were printed on all-Black presses based in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Oakland, written mainly for nonacademic audiences. In the 1990s, Afrocentrism also spurred the successful campaign for separate Afrocentric high schools, with proponents arguing that teaching Afrocentric curricula would be no different than Christian schools with creationism. On a mainstream cultural level, probably Afrocentricity’s most famous hallmark remains the holiday of Kwanzaa. Initiated by Karanga in 1966 as an important component of Kawaida.”
However, Balakrishnan failed to appropriate pan-African history and tradition accurately. Asante did not develop Afrocentricity but build on the tradition of Dubois who developed the sociological approach to African history and experience. But Asante’s Afrocentric Paradigm resolved the discontent among disciplines and institutions that attacked African studies and scholarship as being interdisciplinary and in conflict with other disciplines. Dr. Mazama in the Afrocentric Paradigm discusses Asante’s Afrocentricity as a discipline, science and modus operandi, as against Sarah’s description of Afrocentricity as an academic movement developed in between the 1960 and 1980s. Balakrishnan provides the historical tradition of African history from the 1500s up to the 1980s.
Moreever, Balakrishnan does not reduce Afrocentrism to a principle but a political tradition. Balakrishnan reduces and dilutes the potency of Afrocentricity describing it as a “single movement”, stating that Afrocentrism involves long narrative grassroots political, historical traditions that is not simply a movement, then advances the concept of Afrocentricity as a movement in US academy in the 1980s to pursue liberation through African thought and praxis. For Balakrishnan, Afrocentricity is the movement that pursues Afrocentrism which is a long narrative tradition regarding history and Africa – grassroots political language among black communities for generations, which spans the beginning of life as we know it up to now. It involves, victory, and struggle which have both come to shape the African in the world today. A world moving towards economically, a technological globalized, and socially, multicultural neoliberal world. The economics link the social and the ways cultures and societies have been historically organized and how they change.
For Balakrishnan, Afrocentrism unlike Afrocentricity confronts the problem of race two-folds: firstly, racial revolution – critique of history, and secondly, the critique must be from a uniquely African vantage point. Balakrishnan analyses how Afrocentricity helps to support the second. The movement has created the discipline of Africology focusing on Afrocentricity but within a paradigm that helps to develop the African vantage point. Afrocentricity centers the African experience but the paradigm which Sarah stop short of discussing in her description of Afrocentricity goes further which is why we needed Dr. Mazama to provide an analysis of the
“Afrocentric Paradigm,” which has given rise to the one principle that can never be questioned by any person claiming to be Afrocentric: “The Afrocentrist will not question the idea of the centrality of African ideals and values but will argue over what constitutes those ideals and values”. Example, in the Afrocentric Paradigm, Asante dismisses feminism as not Afrocentric and rejects concept and movement as non-African. For Asante, Feminism opposes and goes against the very idea of the African culture and tradition to embrace masculinity and feminism. But for Asante, the Feminists promotes women and rejects men. But, this is not true. What many Afrocentrists have done is to take the most radical and extreme aspect of a concept to dismiss it. Yet they are quick to say that the best parts of western civilization were influenced by ancient Africa.
While this is undeniable, one must not become too myopic when viewing the world. Feminism and Marxism also had aspects of its teachings that was ripe for the liberation fighters. It confronted and challenged the status quo which was the pulse that helped to give rise to the little freedoms we are able to muster and live while working to carve out a future for our children and grandchildren.
Today Sarah Balakrishnan discusses a new tradition within Afrocentrism, “Afropolitanism”, marking the end of “Black Nationalism” and “Afrocentricity”. Sarah Balakrishnan is an Indian-Canadian Academic who obtained her PhD from Harvard University and is professor at Duke University. Balakrishnan, was influenced by Homi Bhabha who helped to influence the concept of cosmopolitanism explained in Bhabha’s “Location of Culture”, where the African becomes a multicultural and transcending subject in the world with hybrid cultures and identity but a center that remains African. According to Balakrishnan:
“many of my earliest papers focused on a new political current transforming African cultural and literary studies today: this is the concept of “Afropolitanism,” a term coined by both the African diaspora author, Taiye Selasi, and the Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe. Afropolitanism refers to a way of being African in the world—of being “African” and “cosmopolitan,” and of observing African cultures themselves as hybridities formed from many different influences and roots. In “The Afropolitan Idea,” I further elaborated on the long tradition of thinking about cosmopolitanism in Africa. Another essay, “Afropolitanism and the End of Black Nationalism,” published by Routledge, contained more reflections on the meaning of Afropolitanism in relation to Africa’s relationship with the African diaspora, and some of the radical implications of this current of thought.”
Sarah Balakrishnan does not even bother to mention the “Afrocentric Paradigm” in her analysis of the tradition and seem to have misunderstood the concept of “Afrocentricity”. Even in this new “Afropolitanism”, one must be careful that it is not an accommodationist position to continue to accept a culture that continues to discredit Africa and the peoples from Africa. Even within multiculturalism and “Afropolitanism” there is the tendency to promote a fictional form of “afro” or “African” for one that gives way to a Western or European concept of the “Afro” aspect of the “Afropolitant”. One must still develop a consciousness of victory over one of oppression within any construct that attempts to create or recreate the transcended human being. Any hybrid being suggest a compilation of aspects where the African part is diffused and digested into a refurbished “whiteness” or “African Americanness” that continues to misrepresent an essential aspect of a subject’s being.
Therefore, Sara Balakrishnan has done an academic injustice to the concept of “Afrocentrism”, diluting it to various traditions and periods and even leaving out important aspects of the tradition such as the “Afrocentric Paradigm”. This lack has provided a conclusion and invention leading to what we now know as “Afropolitanism”.
Reference
Sarah Balakrishnann (2020) Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism, Souls, 22:1, 71-88 On Afropolitanism https://www.sarahBalakrishnann.com/afropolitanism
“The Afropolitan Idea.” History Compass 15.2 (2017).
“Afropolitanism and the End of Black Nationalism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, edited by Gerard Delanty, Routledge, 2018, pp. 575-585.
Ama Mazama (2001) The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions
Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (March, 2001), pp. 387-405
Sage Publications, Inc. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2668022Dubois, Souls
Fanon, Frantz (1963) Wretched of the Earth. Translated from French to English by Richard
Philcox, 2004. New York, Grove Press.
This paper was submitted to Dr. Ama Mazama as part of the requirements for completing the required course towards the PhD in Africology. Renaldo McKenzie is also Author of Neoliberalism Globalization Income Inequality Poverty and Resistance, a book completed as part part of his thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. Renaldo is Content Creator and Chief at The Neoliberal Corporation, The Neoliberal Round and The Neoliberal Jounals.
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