Afrocentricity

African-American studies academic units came into existence as a result of great political pressure on European institutions of higher learning in a demand for space for the African voice and experience in the late 1960s, during the Black Power movement. No longer satisfied to be culturally disenfranchised and to feel alienated from the classroom (Asante, 1990), African-American students and community activists brought to the fore of the discussion the question of educational relevance for black people, arguing for a culturally inclusive and sensitive curriculum apt to produce scholars in tune with and committed to the betterment of their communities (Karenga). One of the major characteristics of black studies, therefore, has been a dual concern for academic matters and the life conditions of African-Americans, with African-American studies scholars expected to be scholar-activists.

However, if the political mandate of African-American scholars is clear, their intellectual mission has, on the other hand, been clouded with conceptual confusion since the very beginning. Particularly vexing has been the issue of the relationship between African-American studies and the Western academe, with much debate over the status of African-American studies as a full-fledged independent discipline, or rather a field of studies, devoted to the Black experience and yet operating within the confines of Western intellectual thought. At the core of this issue, however, lies the question of Eurocentrism, with the degree to which one seems willing to challenge European intellectual hegemony determining one's position in the debate over the intellectual status of African-American studies.

Eurocentrism is understood as the interpretation of all reality from the Western perspective, especially as it emerged during the European Age of the Enlightenment. That perspective developed both internally, with the development of a metaparadigm specific and relevant to Europe; and externally, in opposition to "others," especially African people. Hence there are at least four assumptions of that European meta-paradigm that have played a major and negative role as far as black people are concerned: (1) all human beings evolve along the same line; (2) the European experience is universal; (3) Europeans are superior; and (4) "others" are defined by their experiences with Europeans. In other words, the European metaparadigm rests among other things on the belief in the superiority and universality of the European experience.

Indeed, in that linear and evolutionary schema of thought, the West claims that when it talks about itself, it is also ipso facto talking about all human beings. The history of all women, men, and children in the world supposedly naturally coincides with that of Europeans. The latter are thus implicitly or explicitly held to be the universal norm by which African intellectual, cultural, and social "progress" will be evaluated. However, if all human beings share a common essence, it is also obvious that they have not all reached the same stage of development. Indeed, it is rather clear, from reading European writers, that Europe precedes the rest of humankind, and time after time it is suggested that Africans must emulate Europeans in order to put an end to their inferior condition.

The expected outcome of such emulation has been a process of mental conversion (Mudimbe, 1988), predicated upon the belief that only through a careful imitation of Europeans would Africans improve their lot. While the ontological reduction of the colonized had been well understood as a necessary part of colonialism, the implications of the conversion process, on the other hand, had not been fully appreciated. This may be precisely because the early African critiques of European colonialism (e.g., Frantz Fanon) still functioned within a fundamentally European conceptual framework, such as Marxism. Hence what was challenged was not Western modernity per se, but its abusive practices. Europe's tacit advancement of its own culture as some "no-man's cultural land"—its implicit claims to cultural neutrality and universality—was rarely questioned for it was not construed as problematic.

Such an approach, which was to be expected during those early days, would not allow one to understand the colonization process as the systematic imposition of the European worldview, grounded in a specific time and place yet parading as universal, on people whose cultural and historical experiences were quite different.