ABSTRACT
This chapter is Molefi Kete Asante’s powerful testimony of marginalized people’s desire and determination toward the recovery of cultural identity and human dignity. His discussion first centers on the African origin of philosophy and the contributions of the earliest African philosophers, which have been eradicated from the intellectual universe due to the Eurocentric structure of knowledge. Asante’s discussion then turns to his signature theory of Afrocentricity that he has pioneered and advanced for the past several decades. He defines the Afrocentric paradigm by highlighting five minimum characteristics: (1) an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals, and signs; (2) a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions of sex, gender, and class; (3) a defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of art, music, and literature; (4) a celebration of “centeredness” and agency and a commitment to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people; and (5) a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of African people. By way of conclusion, Asante engages in a lively critique of Paul Gilroy’s book Against Race as it refuses a collective Black cultural identity.
