Customer Reviews

Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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This book is required reading not only for anyone interested in Afrocentrism and its history, but also for anyone interested in how "popular" history shapes cultural images, goals, and political aspirations. For those who presume that Afrocentrism is a product of postmodern relativism, this book is an important corrective: Moses demonstrates Afrocentrism's emergence (or, more accurately, the emergence of different Afrocentrisms) in the discourse of nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals. (In fact, as he points out, the key concepts of Afrocentric discourse have remained virtually unchanged since their conception.) Moses' commitment to *understanding* how Afrocentric discourse *works* produces genuine insight into how the "literate public" appropriates historical concepts for its own purposes. (He is particularly sympathetic to Afrocentrism's interest in high culture.) Moses is also willing to apportion praise and blame when due, with both Mary Lefkowitz and Maulana Karenga coming in for scathing shares of the latter. In addition to the book's scrupulous research, one must praise its elegant writing style--all too rare in academic prose these days.

Like most serious African-American educators, I don't have a high opinion of so-called "Afrocentric" history. However, I do understand why many of the Black masses feel the psychological need to beleive the historical tall tales and overemphasis on Egyptian Mythology (although in reality, most of today's African-Americans are descended from West Africans).

Dr. Moses does a good job of tracing the roots of afrocentric thought and I learned a lot from the solid evidence he offers. However, he could have left out the personal attacks and name calling regarding Moefi, Lefkowitz, and Karenga and discussed them strictly within the faultiness of their historical work. But other than that, it's a pretty good book.

I usually don't spend any time thinking about or writing reviews of literature I feel is misinformative to the African American people. But this book I find not only misinformative but grossly in error and very subjective. It not only misinterprets many of those in the African American community, it assumes that Afrocentrism is some kind of cult recognized by the misinformed. The author obviously is out of touch with the African American community in general and specifically those "interllectuals" he inaccurately discusses. I totally wasted my money and time with this book.

"A SCIENTIFIC revolution, according to Kuhn [the scientist/linguist author of THE THEORY OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS], is not simply an addition to pre-existing knowledge. It is, within any field, 'a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals'; a complete demolition of an old theoretical and conceptual structure and its replacement by a new one based on entirely different aims and premises. The old paradigm...attacked from the outside...cannot be defeated on the basis of its own rules for, as we have seen...these rules are not only inadequate to solve new problems which have begun to arise--THEY ACTUALLY PRECLUDE ANY DISCUSSION OF THESE PROBLEMS AT ALL."

Dr. Chris Knight, London

From BLOOD RELATIONS:

MENSTRUATION AND THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE

"Unable to detect any contradiction in the formal statements of the Ancients after an objective confrontation with total Egyptian reality, and consequently unable to disprove them, they either give them the silent treatment or reject them dogmatically and indignantly. They express regret that people as normal as the ancient Egyptians could have made so grievous an error and thus create so many difficulties and delicate problems for modern specialists. Next they try in vain to find a White origin for Egyptian civilization. They finally become mired down in their own contradictions...after performing intellectual acrobatics as learned as they are unwarranted. They then repeat the initial dogma...the White origin of Egyptian civilization.

"...Egyptians themselves--who should surely be better qualified than anyone to speak of their origin--recognize without ambiguity that their ancestors came from Nubia and the heart of Africa."

Chek Anta Diop

THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

From Chapter Three, "Modern Falsification of History"

and

Chapter Seven, "Arguments for a Negro Origin"

Giving a balanced, rational and certainly less hysterically racist perspective on the history of Afrocentric thought is an incredible breath of fresh air, considering how many people believe Martin Bernal of BLACK ATHENA is the Great White Hope of modern Black thought on the subject, and as such singlehandedly invented the entire discipline. However, what this book intrinsically lacks is similar to that of all the others (Lefkowitz, Walker, Howe, et al.); that, like John the Baptist would say regarding Christ, aren't worhty of shining the shoes of this one.

What the writers of all of these kinds of books purposely fail at noticing is the inherent intellecual limitations of historiography in its entirety. The subject matter is continuously devalued when its scientific, not cultural, foundations are ignored. Afrocentric thought is a window to long discredited and ignored schools of scientific disicpline; ignored and discredited purely for the sociopolitical agendas of 19th century colonialism and Imperialism gone mad. Without us looking at these sciences anew, we are basically arguing over how many Black angels can stand on the head of a pin.

Three books in particular must be paid attention to, for the sciences they reveal--historical astronomy and linguistics.

First, two representing historical astronomy: the French 19th century astronomer Dupuis' LES ORIGINE DES TOUT LES CULTES (The Origin of All Cults) and the English Sir J. Norman Lockyer's DAWN OF ASTRONOMY are two of the most cited books by the rogue scholar Martin Bernal (author of the contraversial BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION) that his detractors, such as Mary Lefkowtiz (NOT OUT OF AFRICA; BLACK ATHENA REVISITED) puposely never mention in their diatribes against him. Lockyer, the 19th century English mathematician and astronomer (that's scientist; not historian or literary scholar--the source of most of the Eurocentric school of Classicism), did in his time the unthinkable for a scholar in a field that gradually depended upon scholarship devolved into non-scientific dogma: he came up with a theory about the intellectual, scientific and spiritual life of a pre-Hellenic culture in north Africa that went completely against the accepted truisms of common Egyptological opinion... and then proved it, scientifically and mathematically, to be right. Under no uncertain terms, Lockyer--even within the context of the prejudices of his time--completely revolutionized how a north African civilization, whose way of life predates the scientific, mathematical and cultural re-discoveries of the Greeks by thousands of years could be perceived.

Ancient Egypt is shown in THE DAWN OF ASTRONOMY to be a civilization based on a philosophical foundation that made cutting edge science, advanced mathematics and esoteric religion one. Pythagorean and Euclidean geometry; the Fibonacci series; the golden section; Pi; the astronomical phenomenon known as the Precession of the Equinoxes (named by the ancient Greeks the "Socratic Year" some millenia later); the exact length of the solar year, within less than fifteen minutes; the foundational concepts and mathematical formulae of geodesy.... It is all not just written within ancient Egyptian writings, but exemplified in the architecture of every sacred temple built in Egypt from before the Pharonic period (3100 B.C.) on through the Pyramid Age and onward past the Valley of the Kings--millenia before the birth of Pythagoras, Euclid or the entirety of Greece as a culture. Their entire culture, from language to architecture, danced to the rhythm of the stars.

Lockyer shows this with an unprecedented detail that to my knowledge has yet to be surpassed.

Next, is linguistics: Chek Anta Diop and THE AFRICAN ORIGINS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Diop breaks AFRICAN ORIGIN into the following chapters:

I- Preface: The Meaning of our Work

1) What were the Egyptians?

2) Birth of the Negro Myth

3) Modern Falsification of History

4) Could Egyptian Civilization have originated in the Delta?

5) Could Egyptian Civilization Be of Asian Origin?

6) The Egyptian Race as Seen and Treated by Anthropologists

7) Arguments Supporting a Negro Origin

8) Arguments Opposing a Negro Origin

9) Peopling of Africa from the Nile Valley

10) Political and Social Evolution of Ancient Egypt

11) Contribution of Ethiopian-Nubia and Egypt

12) Reply to a Critic

13) Early History of Humanity: Evolution of the Black World

II- Conclusion

Diop, an African physicist and linguist, uses a scientific study of African linguistics to find the obvious connections between African languages in central and western Africa and the ancient hieroglyphs, demotic and coptic of Egypt. His approach to the cultural history of Egypt and its influence on ancient cultures that followed is based almost purely in this scientifc foundation.

Historiography, despite the degree to which it can often reveal truth sandwiched in the changing trends of intellectual thought, has a tendencey to be a disservice to Afrocentrism. Particularly in the non-scientific, overly subjective, political times we are living in. Until metrology, geodesy, non Indo-European based linguistics, Marxian anthropology, historical astronomy and alternative Egyptology become once again a part of the modern language, the debate over the validity of Afrocentrism will continue in the most irrelevant--and latently racist--way possible: through the use of quasi-scientific historical paradigms and prcoesses that are themselves corrupted by sociology.

(P.S.: all the above mentioned sciences prove, on one way or another, the fundamental points made about Afrocentrism and the origins of culture.)

Not all African slaves came from West Africa, to the impaired minds. Africans were orignally from south and East Africa which is were Africans originated, and later migrated to West, North, North west, and North east(in no particular order) Africa. Indeed the comments from viewers and the author's need to study geography as it pertains to African ppl as a whole. Just becos most Africans were taking from West Africa doesnt take away from the other parts of Africa inwhich African negro slaves also were taking to different countries, which does not take away from the evidence of what they created and left behind, before any calamities. So, if there is this outcry from so-called black Afro-centric ppl, it is only becos ppl like this Author will go out of their way to write a lame book like this, being a kiss ass who gives this watered down interpretation of the insulting word called Afrocentricity. Indeed this Author should write a book about how the Indians are overreacting about Native American Indianism being that their majority of ppl where killed by English invaders, what! are they exaggerating as well? To mark African descendants as being Afrocentric in a negative way, is nothing more than a weak attempt by Euro scholars and their brown nosing Euro-students and Non-Euro-students to discredit African scholars who have been bringing evidence to the table and not emotional baggage. Indeed ppl, pay attention to geographical migration and overall African homogeny, before you accuse ppl who know their own kin as being a racially profiled Afrocentric. Ppl who agree with unproven ideas are worser than the ones pointing the finger. GET A LIFE!