|
Afrocentrism (also Afrocentricity) is a cultural ideology, worldview mostly limited to the United States and is dedicated to the history of Black people. It is a response to global (Eurocentric/Orientalist) attitudes about African people and their historical contributions and revisits their history with an African cultural and ideological focus. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a Pan-African ideology in culture, philosophy, and history.〔(Asante on Afrocentricity ).〕〔''Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American'' Volume 1., p. 111 by Henry Louis Gates (Editor), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Editor) Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 0-19-517055-5〕 Afrocentrism can be seen as an African-American inspired ideology that manifests an affirmation of themselves in a Eurocentric-dominated society, commonly by conceptualizing a glorified heritage in terms of distinctly African, foreign origins (where foreign is anything not indigenous to the African continent). It often denies or minimizes European cultural influences while accenting historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on African-American culture and the history of Africa, and involves an African Diaspora version of an African-centered view of history and culture to portray the achievements and development of Africans who have been marginalized. What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African-American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African-American intellectuals in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and in the development of African-American Studies programs in universities. In strict terms Afrocentrism, as a distinct academic ideology, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s.〔(Wilson J. Moses: Historical Sketches of Afrocentrism ).〕 Today it is primarily associated with Molefi Asante.〔The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics (), forewords by Maulana Karenga- ""Molefi Asante, the founding and preeminent theorist of Afrocentricity, is one of the most important intellectuals at work today. This work continues his tradition of combining an extraordinary intellectual range with an impressive ability to identify and clarify central issues in the current discourse on Afrocentricity, multiculturalism, race, culture, ethnicity and related themes. Dr. Asante offers an insightful and valuable response to Eurocentric critics of the Afrocentric initiative while simultaneously addressing a wide range of issues critical to understanding this important intellectual enterprise, including African agency, location, orientation, centerdness, subject-place and cultural groundedness. The volume is thoughtful, multifaceted and rewarding, and yields a rich sense of the contours and complexity of the Afrocentric project." --Dr. Maulana Karenga, Chair, Department of Black Studies, California State University, Long Beach"〕 Proponents of Afrocentrism support the claim that the contributions of various African people have been downplayed or discredited as part of the legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history".〔(Rewriting History, Rebel and Motherhood by Susan Andrade ).p.91〕 Critics of Afrocentricity accuse it of being pseudo-history, reactive, and therapeutic. ==Terminology== The term "Afrocentrism" dates to 1962. The adjective "Afrocentric" appears in a typescript proposal for an entry in ''Encyclopedia Africana'', possibly due to W. E. B. Du Bois. The abstract noun "Afrocentricity" dates to the 1970s, and was popularized by Molefi Asante's ''Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change'' (1980). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Afrocentrism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|