You Can't Go Home Again: The Problem with Afrocentrism

Abstract

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language.

The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies

“…Atlantic pan‐Africanism presented its own limitations, especially as it was reborn in the late twentieth century. Though the American Afrocentrism espoused by scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante (1988) and Maulana Karenga (1993) did much to reveal the mythical aspects of allegedly objective scholarly practices, it fetishized African history and culture, appropriating them to meet American psychological and political needs (Adeleke, 2009; Appiah, 1990; Gates, 1988; Hall, 2021; Walker, 2001). Critics have called out American Afrocentrism's heteronormative and misogynistic undercurrents (Collins, 2006; hooks, 1992, p. 106–110) and stressed the importance of theorizing the Black Atlantic on its own terms rather than seeing it as a long‐lost extension of African history and culture (Gilroy, 1993; Mintz & Price, 1976; Spillers, 2006).…”