Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism
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Description
In the last few years, there has been a stream of publications, especially in the United States, aimed at establishing a new basis for the study and teaching of African and African-American culture. Whether or not they actually use the word “Afrocentric” on their packaging, those books—which differ enormously in the quality of their thought and writing, as well as in their factual reliability—have a certain common set of pre-occupations, whose persistence entitles one now to speak of an Afrocentric paradigm. This has two basic elements, one critical, the other positive, which are either argued or taken for granted. The negative thesis is that modern Western scholarship on cultural matters, high and low, is hopelessly Eurocentric. This mean, to begin with, that Western scholarship understands European history, intellectual life and social institutions as an ideal type, both normatively and descriptively. But Eurocentric work also displays an inability, rooted in prejudice, to enter sympathetically into the form of life of non-Europeans, and, especially, of black people of African descent. As a consequence, Western scholarship presupposes, so the story goes, that Africans have produced little of much cultural worth, and that cultural works of sophistication or value (like the architecture of Great Zimbabwe or the Pyramids), even when they are in Africa, are unlikely to have been produced by black people. In support of this Eurocentric thesis, some (and occasionally a great deal of) work goes into showing that European scholars, at least since the Enlightenment, have concealed facts about the African origins of certain central elements of Western civilization; notably the Egyptian origins of the Greek “miracle” and the black African origins of the Egyptian “miracle.” This negative thesis is argued as the prolegomenon to an alternative, positive, “Afrocentric” view, in which African cultural creativity is discovered to have been at the origin of Western civilization, while Western Civilization, especially modern Western civilization, is either asserted or implied to be morally depraved; incapable, in particular, of living peacefully with others. We (sometimes all of us, sometimes just those who are black) are urged, then, to centre on African history (and particularly the history of the Egypt of the Pharaohs) and return to African values.
Source Publication
Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation
Source Editors/Authors
Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, Christopher B. Steiner
Publication Date
2010
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 2065.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2065
