Content area
Full Text
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ix + 313 pp. (Cloth US$54.95; Paper US$19.95)
In the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Black Studies programs were institutionalized in many U.S. colleges and universities. Afrocentricity, committed to placing African-descended peoples at the center of intellectual inquiry, arrived on campuses a short time later, concurrent with legislation I designed to promote equality of education and employment. Today, however, ideas that prompted initiatives , to remedy collective historical injustices have been replaced by the notion that oppression must be current, tangible, and individualized in order to be real. In addition, claims are now made that affirmative action programs foster discriminatory practices and are therefore unjustified unless proponents prove otherwise. Consequently, we must judge two opposed arguments: (1) that past inequalities are reproduced and sustained in the present versus (2) that the past is "dead" or at least qualitatively different from the present.
If these claims and arguments stem from a failure to see history from the perspective of Africandescended peoples, then Afrocentricity should provide useful insights for challenging current manifestations of racism. Wilson J. Moses seeks to explain why, ironically, this has not been the case in Afrotopia, a book that still raises questions worthy of careful consideration six years after its publication. According to Moses, Afrocentricity has not effectively challenged dominant historical narratives. Instead, it has only boosted the self-esteem of African Americans by becoming a source of empowering myths.
W.E.B. Du Bois first used the term "Afro-centric" in 1962, Moses reports, maintaining that Molefi Asante's introductory text Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980), where most people look for the concept's origins, actually vulgarized the concept (p. 2). Moses then explains that Afrocentricity has its "origins in enlightenment Christianity, eighteenth-century progressivism, and black resistance to white supremacy" (p. 16). For him, these influences combined...