Customer Reviews

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (5 Volume Set)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a university professor in African American Studies, I looked forward to the first edition and bought it. But I was disappointed by the woefully lacking index which is also the case with the 2nd edition.

The five-volume 2nd edition is much easier to handle in terms of weight for each volume than the VERY heavy one volume 1st edition. However, one must wonder how Harvard professors (the editors) could allow a lack of a comprehensive index the second time around.

I bought the 1st edition, but I recommend not buying the 2nd edition. If a future edition has a comprehensive index, I will buy and would urge you to buy, as there is a wealth of information.

As for this (2nd) edition, save your money. Use the volumes at your school/university or community library for good general background information on the African and African American Experience.

This two million-word compendium of facts and interpretations is the definitive work on the African and African American experience. About a third of it is devoted to each of the main strains of the African Diaspora: Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

It does not so much challenge the existing Eurocentric narrative as sidesteps it altogether -- going around and well beyond the historical territory that existed long before the Roman empire, for instance. Plus, it pulls together all the missing links into a very pleasing and integral if only a symbolic whole. And although it is a competing story that begins at the beginning of man "out of Africa," "peopling the rest of the world," and treats the Diaspora in its fullest glory, it is not a scholarly work guilty of multiplying the Eurocentric bias by only replacing it with an equally undesirable African bias.

Inspired by and thus dedicated to W.E.B. DuBois, who had spent the latter part of his life unsuccessfully trying to get just such a scholarly project done, it is a fitting tribute to his legacy both in terms of its high standards of scholarship, and in terms of its comprehensiveness.

As is made clear in the introduction, DuBois migrated to Ghana at the invitation of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah to complete just such a project as this one. The invitation came only after a long and bitter internecine struggle back in the U.S. among black historians to get funding and to publish an encyclopedia on Africans in the U.S. Although, he died before the project could be completed, this is the project worthy of his fondest dreams, and I have no doubt that he would have been justly proud of it. It is well worth the price.

Fifty Stars