Afrocentricity: Towards a New Understanding of the African Experience. Contribution by Molefi Kete Asante. To be published by the University Press of America (Fall 2007 or Spring 2008).

Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity has grown in strength in the past four decades mostly thanks to the unwavering efforts of black scholars and activists such as Cheikh Anta Diop, G.G. James, Molefi Asante, John Henrik Clarke, and many others. It also got a significant boost from liberal white scholars such as Basil Davidson and Martin Bernal. However, because the initial impetus certainly came from early 19th century activism by numerous blacks in the Americas who took it upon themselves to start the work of reasserting the dignity of black people around the world, names such as those of David Walker, Hosea Easton, James Pennington, Robert B. Lewis, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, William Wells Brown, Edward Wilmot Blyden, James ‘Africanus’ Horton, Joseph E. Haynes, Booker T. Washington, and many others, naturally come to mind. These earlier Afrocentrists worked from various perspectives and beliefs, but they certainly had in mind the ultimate liberation of black people, whatever such liberation meant for them. 20th-century Afrocentricity certainly owes a lot to these various early expressions of blackness as they all sought to tell the African experience in their own words. The various contributors to this volume will, in turn, and in their own way, shed further light on the African experience as shared by Africans and peoples of African descent around the world.

Coming Soon: To be published by the University Press of America.

Introduction, by Daniel M. Mengara

PART I: Afrocentricity: The Rationale

Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University, Afrocentricity: General Notes Toward African Reconstruction

Daniel Mengara, Montclair State University, Battle of Histories: Eurocentric Aryanism, Afrocentricity, and the African Experience

PART II: Ancient African Experiences

Greg Moses,  Marist College, Diggin’ Atlantis: An Archaeology of Afrocentric Dreams in Plato and Diop

Rev. Prof. David Tuesday Adamo, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria, The Search for Africanness in the Bible

Reginald H. Pitts, Project Historian, John Milner Associates, A Peculiar Sense of The Classical’: PRIVATE Robert Benjamin Lewis and Light And Truth.

PART III: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences

Catherine Kunce, Metropolitan State College of Denver, The Bleaching of Sojourner’s Truths: Accommodating White Sensibilities

Scot Lahaie, Baylor University, Ira Aldridge: Black Actor, White History

Aimable Twagilimana, State University of New York, College at Buffalo, W.E.B Du Bois and The Pan-Africanist Thought

Kara M. Rabbitt, William Paterson University, Cultural Genealogies and Pre-Negritude Africanicity in Légitime défense

PART IV: Contemporary Challenges

Raphael C. Njoku, Dalhousie University, Canada, African Intellectuals and the Problem of Political Instability in Africa: The Challenge in the New Millennium

Funwi F. Ayuninjam, Kentucky State University, Perceptions and Misperceptions: Mutual Stereotyping Between Africans and African Americans

Waseem Anwar, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Histories of Censorship: A Psycho-semiotic Study of Silence in African American Women’s Drama

Daniel M. Mengara, Montclair State University, When Black Men Rule The World? Notes on Black Cultural Empowerment & “Imperialism”