Afrocentric Traditions

Ever since the first contacts between Europe and Africa, African people have operated from the fringes of Eurocentric experience in the Western mind. Much of what we have studied in African history and culture, or literature and linguistics, or politics and economics, has been orchestrated from the standpoint of Europe's interests. Whether it is a matter of economics, history, politics, geographical concepts, or art, Africans have been seen as peripheral. This volume reviews the past in order to evaluate the present and move ahead with appropriate policies for the future. The articles in this volume, the first in a new serial publication in Africana studies, cover a broad range of subject matter and methodology. Topics range from the W.E.B. DuBois-Booker T. Washington schism that led to the formation of the Niagara movement, to the popular dissemination of black hip-hop culture. It opens with a description of Afrocentricity by Molefi K. Asante. Kobi K.K. Kambon and Reginald Rackley discuss the construct, that produces European cultural "misidentification" among Africans. Nell Irvin Painter, in discussing the Shoah and Southern history, parallels the rhetoric of hate that permeated the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German diatribes against Jews with that of the Southern white supremacists against blacks. Anthony B. Pinn notes similarities that tie together slavery and colonialism in a bond of existential and ontological destruction. Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr., examines critical issues about black masculinity. James B. Stewart elaborates on the development of Africana studies. Julius E. Thompson explores the historical importance of the African-American writer in Mississippi history. Cary DeCordova Wintz the basis of the conflict between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington in an effort to expose its underlying causes. James L. Conyers, Jr. summarizes social and cultural movements, in particular the popular black hip-hop culture. Rounding out the pres

1. Afrocentricity: Notes on a Disciplinary Position Molefi Kete Asante 2. The Cultural Misorientation Construct and the Cultural Misorientation Scale: An Africentric Measure of European Cultural Misidentification among Africans in America Kobi K. K. Kambon and Reginald Rackley 3. The Shoah and Southern History Nell Irvin Painter 4. Religio-Theological Formations and the (Re)Making of Black Kenyan Bodies: An African American's Perspective Anthony B. Pinn 5. Africana Studies and the Crisis of Black Masculinity Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr. 6. Social Science and Systematic Inquiry in Africana Studies: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century James B. Stewart 7. African American Mississippi Writers, Historians, and Journalists, 1865-2004 Julius E. Thompson 8. A Fundamental Incompatibility? A Reassessment of the Basis of the Conflict between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington Cary DeCordova Wintz 9. Africana Studies and Black Popular Hip-Hop Culture: A Reflexive Summary of Social and Cultural Movements James L. Conyers, Jr. 10. The Roots of Black Studies Lea Redmond and Charles P. Henry Contributors Index