Molefi Kete Asante

Works

• 1980Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change

  Programmatic book that gave the approach its name: people of African descent should take their bearings from African history and values rather than from a European perspective presented as universal; a collective consciousness is to guide social change.

• 1987The Afrocentric Idea

  Theoretical work on Afrocentric method in the study of communication and culture: every interpretation has a location; Eurocentric scholarship presents its particular location as universal, while an Afrocentric analysis places African people at the centre as agents.

Position

Asante is on the map as the founder of Afrocentricity, one of the main – and most contested – paradigms of Africana studies. In Afrocentricity (1980) and The Afrocentric Idea (1987) he argued that interpretation always has a location: Eurocentric scholarship presents the particular experience and standpoint of Europe as universal and places Africans at the margins of history, as objects; an Afrocentric analysis instead places people of African descent at the centre, as subjects and agents of their own history, and asks how phenomena look from that location. Following Cheikh Anta Diop, he treats ancient Egypt (Kemet) as the classical civilisation of Africa, as Greece serves Europe, and sees a cultural unity among African peoples. He has also written on rhetoric, intercultural communication and the history of Africa and of African America. The approach inspired curricula and Africana departments but drew strong criticism: Kwame Anthony Appiah (1993) objected that it inverts rather than overcomes Eurocentrism and rests on a racial idea of Africa, and Paul Gilroy (1993) criticised it as a form of ethnic absolutism; Mary Lefkowitz (1996) disputed claims about the African origins of Greek philosophy made by some Afrocentric authors. Asante replied to his critics in several essays and has maintained that Afrocentricity is a method of location, not a claim of superiority over others.

Life & context

Molefi Kete Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. on 14 August 1942 in Valdosta, Georgia. He studied at Southwestern Christian College, Oklahoma Christian College and Pepperdine University and took his doctorate in communication at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968, where he then directed the Center for Afro-American Studies. In 1969 he co-founded the Journal of Black Studies. He taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and in the 1970s took the name Molefi Kete Asante. From 1984 he chaired the Department of African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, which in 1988 began the first doctoral programme in African American studies in the United States. He has written and edited a large number of books on Africana studies, communication and the history of Africa.

Further main works

• The Rhetoric of Black Revolution (as A. L. Smith, 1969)
• Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990)
• The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony (2007)
• Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait (2007)