183-500: Afrocentrism is a worldview that is centered on the history of people of African descent or a view that favors it over non-African civilizations. It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for
366-496: A Second European colonization wave . The assumption of European exceptionalism is widely reflected in popular genres of literature, especially in literature for young adults (for example, Rudyard Kipling 's 1901 novel Kim ) and in adventure-literature in general. Portrayal of European colonialism in such literature has been analysed in terms of Eurocentrism in retrospect, such as presenting idealised and often exaggeratedly masculine Western heroes, who conquered "savage" peoples in
549-512: A pan-Africanist perspective that people of color are all "African people" or " diasporic Africans," citing physical characteristics they exhibit in common with Black Africans. Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes that they are all part of the "global African community." Some Afrocentric writers include in the African diaspora the Dravidians of India, " Negritos " of Southeast Asia ( Thailand ,
732-596: A "culture of dislocation." For Iton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and Middle Passage , notions of dispersal, and "the cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing, and retrieving 'Africa.'" This conventional framework for analyzing the diaspora is dangerous, according to Iton, because it presumes that diaspora exists outside of Africa, thus simultaneously disowning and desiring Africa. Further, Iton suggests
915-465: A "real lack of balance" in the discussion among participants. The ancient world did not employ racial categories such as "Black" or "White" as they had no conception of "race", but rather labeled groups according to their land of origin and cultural traits. However, Keita studying the controversy, finds simplistic political appellations (in the negative or affirmative) describing ancient populations as "black" or "white" to be inaccurate and instead focuses on
1098-772: A category for ideological reasons. As of 2020, there were approximately 1,000,000 Afro-Germans . This number is difficult to estimate because the German census does not use race as a category. Some black people of unknown origin (Though perceived as Ethiopians ) once inhabited southern Abkhazia ; today, they have been assimilated into the Abkhaz population. African emigrants to Italy include Italian citizens and residents originally from Africa; immigrants from Africa officially residing in Italy in 2015 numbered over 1 million residents. There are an estimated 500,000 African or mixed African people in
1281-606: A challenge to the existing slave systems in the region. Continuous waves of slave rebellions , such as the Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe in British Jamaica , created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region, with Great Britain abolishing it in the 1830s . The Spanish colony of Cuba was the last Caribbean island to emancipate its slaves. During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people began to assert their cultural, economic and political rights on
1464-451: A critic of the movement, summarises its goals in the preface to his book History in Black , in which he states: Thus, if historical myths and legends, or an invented history, play such a major role in the founding of every national reconstruction, the question that should concern us here is the nature of the distinct style in which black Americans imagine their past. The answer to this question
1647-503: A discourse that is implicitly counter-productive to the anti-Eurocentric values they advocate." [Africa] is no historical part of the World, it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it- that is in the northern part- belong to the Atlantic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to
1830-412: A facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun as "very light-skinned" which reflected "bias" and "predictably and justifiably, it has provoked protests from Afrocentrists" as "Egyptologists have been strangely reluctant to admit that the ancient Egyptians were rather dark-skinned Africans, especially the farther south one goes". In 2011, Stephen Quirke , professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology argued that
2013-486: A greater mixture in the south-western departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca . In these mestizo areas the African culture has had a great influence. Some European countries make it illegal to collect demographic census information based on ethnicity or ancestry (e.g. France), but some others do query along racial lines (e.g. the UK). Of 42 countries surveyed by a European Commission against Racism and Intolerance study in 2007, it
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#17328767571952196-670: A large population of Chinese people . European women are ranked below Chinese women in the female beauty hierarchy. According to the author, the blonde hair of Swedish women reduced their femininity, because it was racialized as a Western trait. The authors also noted that these women's Swedish husbands were highly attracted to local East Asian women, which further reduced the self-esteem of the blonde Swedish women living in Singapore. The use of European female models has actually declined within Japan, and some Japanese skincare companies have discontinued
2379-488: A multidisciplinary approach and their growing legitimacy in historiography, contemporary historians are still tasked with decolonising African historiography , building the institutional frameworks incorporating African epistemologies , and representing an African perspective. Eurocentrism affected Latin America through colonial domination and expansion. This occurred through the application of new criteria meant to "impose
2562-451: A new social classification of the world population on a global scale". Based on this occurrence, a new social-historic identities were newly produced, although already produced in America. Some of these names include; 'Whites', 'Negroes', 'Blacks', 'Yellows', 'Olives', 'Indians', and 'Mestizos'. With the advantage of being located in the Atlantic basin, 'Whites' were in a privileged to control gold and silver production. The work which created
2745-481: A new starting principle for the use of diaspora: "the impossibility of settlement that correlates throughout the modern period with the cluster of disturbances that trouble not only the physically dispersed but those moved without traveling." Iton adds that this impossibility of settlement—this "modern matrix of strange spaces—outside the state but within the empire"—renders notions of black citizenship fanciful, and in fact, "undesirable". Iton argues that we citizenship,
2928-479: A new understanding of them not as psychologically damaged dupes, but instead as agential experts in children's culture." In 2012, Mexicans recreated the doll test. Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination presented a video where children had to pick the "good doll", and the doll that looks like them. By doing this experiment, the researchers sought to analyse the degree to which Mexican children are influenced by modern-day media accessible to them. Most of
3111-445: A positive and progressive paradigm. The aim was to assign religious signification to the idea of African centeredness. However, it has come to refer to a broad cultural movement of the late twentieth century that has a set of philosophical, political, and artistic ideas which provides the basis for the musical, sartorial, and aesthetic dimensions of the African personality. On the other hand, Afrocentricity, as I have previously defined it,
3294-786: A role in the 2000s to 2010s in the context of the academic discourse on race in the United States and critical whiteness studies , aiming to expose white supremacism and white privilege . Afrocentrist scholars, such as Molefi Kete Asante , have argued that there is a prevalence of Eurocentric thought in the processing of much of academia on African affairs. Similarly, the Asiacentric scholar, Yoshitaka Miike, has critiqued theoretical, methodological, and comparative Eurocentrism in knowledge production about Asian societies and cultures. In contrast, in an article, 'Eurocentrism and Academic Imperialism' by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi , from
3477-594: A show of positive leadership). In both forms of Eurocentrism, the discourse performs "the West" as the main actor capable of organising the world in its image. European exceptionalism remains the same—although, from the postcolonial Eurocentric view, Europe is not considered to be the best actor ever, but the worst.' Arab journalists detected Eurocentrism in western media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when
3660-410: A significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in contemporary African-American culture among others. 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
3843-506: A state of statelessness thereby deconstructing colonial sites and narratives in an effort to "de-link geography and power," putting " all space into play" (emphasis added) For Iton, diaspora's potential is represented by a "rediscursive albeit agonistic field of play that might denaturalize the hegemonic representations of modernity as unencumbered and self-generating and bring into clear view its repressed, colonial subscript". African diaspora populations include but are not limited to: It
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#17328767571954026-486: A supporter of Afrocentric ideas, has warned Afrocentrists to avoid certain pitfalls, including: Eurocentrism Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western-centrism ) refers to viewing the West as the center of world events or superior to all other cultures. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western world to just the continent of Europe or even more narrowly, to Western Europe (especially during
4209-566: 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). Molefi Kete Asante's theory, Afrocentricity, has been one developed in academic settings and may incorporate the terms Afrocentric to describe scholarship and Afrocentrists to describe scholars, but does not use Afrocentrism. According to Asante, though
4392-443: Is a theory of agency, that is, the idea that African people must be viewed and view themselves as agents rather than spectators to historical revolution and change. To this end Afrocentricity seeks to examine every aspect of the subject place of Africans in historical, literary, architectural, ethical, philosophical, economic, and political life. Afrocentrism has its origins in the work of African and African diaspora intellectuals in
4575-416: Is also considered to be the primary "proactive" subject of world politics—but, in this case, by being described as the leading edge of global oppression, not progress. Indeed, according to postcolonial Eurocentrism, European capacity to homogenise the world according to its own standards of unification is considered to be a malevolent process (i.e. the destruction of diversity) rather than a benevolent one (i.e.
4758-465: Is better. Donna Goldstein's book Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown also addresses how whiteness influences beauty in Brazil. Goldstein notes that in Brazil, there is a hierarchy for beauty that places being mixed race at the top and pure, un-admixed black characteristics at the bottom, calling them ugly. African diaspora The global African diaspora
4941-484: Is by looking at their hair, nose, then mouth before considering skin colour. Edmonds focuses on the popularity of plastic surgery in Brazilian culture. Plastic surgeons usually applaud and flatter mixtures when emulating aesthetics for performing surgery, and the more popular mixture is African and European. This shapes beauty standards by racialising biological and popular beauty ideals to suggest that mixture with whiteness
5124-581: Is characteristic of three misconceptions manifested by self-centerment, the fixed development of Oriental countries and linear progress. There has been some debate on whether historical Eurocentrism qualifies as "just another ethnocentrism ", as it is found in most of the world's cultures, especially in cultures with imperial aspirations, as in the Sinocentrism in China; in the Empire of Japan (c. 1868–1945), or during
5307-721: Is clearly the most important of the five continents, over which it has gained a most influential government both in material and even more so in cultural aspects". European exceptionalism thus grew out of the Great Divergence of the Early Modern period , due to the combined effects of the Scientific Revolution , the Commercial Revolution , and the rise of colonial empires , the Industrial Revolution and
5490-711: Is considered inclusive of the African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American black communities in Canada. At an intermediate level, in South America and in the former plantations in and around the Indian Ocean, descendants of enslaved people are a bit harder to define because many people are mixed in demographic proportion to the original slave population. In places that imported relatively few slaves (like Chile ), few if any are considered "black" today. In places that imported many enslaved people (like Brazil or Dominican Republic ),
5673-499: Is dramatic. It is a conflict between natural and artificial contexts." Indigenous scholars Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Linco state that "in some ways, the epistemological critique initiated by Indigenous knowledge is more radical than other sociopolitical critiques of the West, for the Indigenous critique questions the very foundations of Western ways of knowing and being." The terms Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism have come to play
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5856-612: Is illegal for the French State to collect data on ethnicity and race. The first Africans in the Americas arrived in the region during the initial period of European colonization . In 1492, Afro-Spanish sailor Pedro Alonso Niño served as a pilot on the voyages of Christopher Columbus ; though he returned to the Americas in 1499, Niño did not settle in the region. By the early 16th century, more Africans began to arrive in Spanish colonies in
6039-521: Is largely patrilineal with an estimated 19% of African American ancestors being European males, and 5% being European females. The interracial mixing occurred before the Civil War and largely in the American South , beginning during the colonial era . The states with the highest percentages of people of African descent are Mississippi (36%), and Louisiana (33%). While not a state, the population of
6222-468: Is not a question of “African” “influence”; Ancient Egypt was organically African. Studying early Egypt in its African context is not “Afrocentric,” but simply correct". Keita has argued that the original inhabitants of the Nile Valley were primarily a variety of indigenous Northeast Africans from the areas of the desiccating Sahara and more southerly areas. He reviewed studies on the biological affinities of
6405-539: Is shown in the latter, as the nature of manifest Orientalism is to be altered with new findings, which leaves it vulnerable to the warping of its refiner's ideals and principles. In this state, eurocentrism has used orientalism to portray the Orient as "backwards" and bolster the superiority of the Western world and continue the undermining of their cultures to further the agenda of racial inequality. With those wanting to represent
6588-492: Is that radical Afrocentrism, the subject of this study, which plays a central role in shaping the modern historical world-view of a large section of the African-American (or Afro-American) community, is far more than an effort to follow the line taken by many ethnic groups and nations in modern rewriting, inventing or developing collective identity and national history. Rather, it is a large-scale historical project to rewrite
6771-501: Is the morena ; a mixed-race brown woman who is supposed to represent the best characteristics of every racial group in Brazil. According to Alexander Edmond's book Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil , whiteness plays a role in Latin American, specifically Brazilian, beauty standards, but it is not necessarily distinguished based on skin colour. Edmonds said the main ways to define whiteness in people in Brazil
6954-494: Is the speciality of Europe, because Oriental countries such as India and China do not contain the factors which would enable them to develop capitalism in a sufficient manner. Weber wrote and published many treatises in which he emphasized the distinctiveness of Europe. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he wrote that the "rational" capitalism, manifested by its enterprises and mechanisms, only appeared in
7137-506: Is the worldwide collection of communities descended from people from Africa , predominantly in the Americas . The African populations in the Americas are descended from haplogroup L genetic groups of native Africans. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the native West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between
7320-641: Is why the Ancient Egyptian civilisation did not occur in Africa , it occurred only here”. In 2022, Hawass reiterated his view that "Africans have nothing to do with the pyramids scientifically " and stated that Africans "ruled in Egypt in the late Era, at the time of the 25th dynasty". Hawass also accused some international figures of African descent that promoted Afrocentrism of racism and fabrication of Egyptian history. In 2008, Stuart Tyson Smith expressed criticism of
7503-592: The American Century . James M. Blaut (2000) argued that Eurocentrism indeed went beyond other ethnocentrisms, as the scale of European colonial expansion was historically unprecedented and resulted in the formation of a "colonizer's model of the world". Indigenous philosophies have been noted to greatly contrast with Eurocentric thought. Indigenous scholar James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson states that Eurocentricism contrasts greatly with Indigenous worldviews: "the discord between Aboriginal and Eurocentric worldviews
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7686-560: The Americas during the transatlantic slave trade , 645,000 were shipped to the British colonies on the North American mainland and the United States . In 2000, African Americans comprised 12.1 percent of the total population in the United States, constituting the largest racial minority group. The African-American population is concentrated in the southern states and urban areas. In
7869-506: The Atlantic , Trans-Saharan , Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades. The earliest recorded evidence of Africans as slaves outside of Africa comes from Ancient Greece and Rome . In the Greco-Roman world , almost all native Africans were known primarily as Aithiopians , a term that means "burnt face" (αἴθω, aíthō , 'I burn' + ὤψ, ṓps , 'face'), rather than referring to the geographical location of Ethiopia . Most Aithiopian slaves in
8052-578: The Bantu peoples of Southeast Africa , along with Habesha immigrants. Some were merchants, sailors, indentured servants , slaves and mercenaries. The Siddi population is currently estimated at 850,000 individuals, with Karnataka , Gujarat and Telangana states in India and Makran and Karachi in Pakistan as the main population centres. Siddis are primarily Muslims, although some are Hindus and others belong to
8235-865: The Canaries . There are about 2,500,000 (4.2%) people identifying as Black British (not including British Mixed ), among which are Afro-Caribbeans . They live mostly in urban areas in England . The first Black people in Russia were the result of the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire and their descendants still live on the coasts of the Black Sea . Czar Peter the Great was advised by his friend Lefort to bring in Africans to Russia for hard labor. Alexander Pushkin 's great-grandfather
8418-653: The Cape Verde Islands , started to arrive in a voluntary immigration wave to seek employment as whalers in Massachusetts . This migration continued until restrictive laws were enacted in 1921 that in effect closed the door on non-Europeans. By that time, men of African ancestry were already a majority in New England 's whaling industry, with African Americans working as sailors, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, officers, and owners. The internationalism of whaling crews, including
8601-742: The Catholic Church . Although often economically and socially marginalised as a community today, Siddis once ruled Bengal as the Habshi dynasty of the Bengal Sultanate , while the famous Siddi, Malik Ambar , effectively controlled the Ahmadnagar Sultanate . He played a major role, politically and militarily, in Indian history by slowing down the penetration of the Delhi-based Mughals into
8784-516: The Christian Bible , including the idea of a " Black Jesus ". In 1966 Maulana Karenga of the black separatist US Organization created Kwanzaa ; which became the first specifically African American holiday to be widely observed amongst African Americans. Karenga rejected liberation theology and considered the practice of Christianity anti-thetical to the creation of an African-American identity independent from white America. Karenga said his goal
8967-505: The Cold War ). When the term is applied historically, it may be used in reference to the presentation of the European perspective on history as objective or absolute, or to an apologetic stance toward European colonialism and other forms of imperialism . The term "Eurocentrism" dates back to the late 1970s but it did not become prevalent until the 1990s, when it was frequently applied in
9150-557: The Dalaman , Menderes and Gediz valleys, Manavgat , and Çukurova . In the 19th century, contemporary records mention African quarters of İzmir , including Sabırtaşı, Dolapkuyu, Tamaşalık, İkiçeşmelik, and Ballıkuyu. Africans in Turkey are around 100.000 people. There are a number of communities in South Asia that are descended from African slaves, traders or soldiers. These communities are
9333-787: The Deccan Plateau of South central India. Some Pan-Africanists also consider other peoples as diasporic African peoples. These groups include, among others, Negritos , such as in the case of the peoples of the Malay Peninsula ( Orang Asli ); New Guinea (Papuans); Andamanese ; certain peoples of the Indian subcontinent , and the aboriginal peoples of Melanesia and Micronesia . Most of these claims are rejected by mainstream ethnologists as pseudoscience and pseudo-anthropology, as part of ideologically motivated Afrocentrist irredentism , touted primarily among some extremist elements in
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#17328767571959516-516: The District of Columbia is more than 50% black. Recent African immigrants represent a minority of black people nationwide. The U.S. Bureau of the Census categorizes the population by race based on self-identification. The census surveys have no provision for a "multiracial" or "biracial" self-identity, but since 2000, respondents may check off more than one box and claim multiple ethnicity that way. Much of
9699-539: The Greco-Roman world came from Kush (modern-day Sudan ), after they became prisoners of war in altercations with nearby Egypt . Archaeological evidence shows that a very small proportion of slaves in the Greco-Roman world were Aithiopian , in part due to the distance required for import. Aithiopian slaves were primarily engaged in domestic and entertainment work, leading archaeologists to believe that they were considered an expensive luxury. In one ostentatious display,
9882-693: The Hamitic hypothesis and the Dynastic Race Theory . These theories, they contend, attempted to identify certain African ethnicities, such as Nubians, Ethiopians and Somalis, as "Caucasoid" groups that entered Africa to bring civilization to the natives. They believe that Western academics have traditionally limited the peoples they defined as "Black" Africans to those south of the Sahara , but used broader "Caucasoid" or related categories to classify peoples of Egypt or North Africa. Afrocentrists also believe strongly in
10065-540: The Indian Ocean as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade , roughly eight million were shipped northwards as part of the Trans-Saharan slave trade , and roughly eleven million were transported to the Americas as part of the Atlantic slave trade . Their descendants are now found around the globe, but because of intermarriage they are not necessarily readily identifiable. Many scholars have challenged conventional views of
10248-721: The Olmec people, who built the first highly complex civilization in Mesoamerica and are considered by some to be the mother civilization for all other civilizations of Mesoamerica, were deeply influenced by Africans. Van Sertima said that the Olmec civilization was a hybrid one of Africans and Native Americans. His theory of pre-Columbian American-African contact has since met with considerable and detailed opposition by scholars of Mesoamerica. Van Sertima has been accused of "doctoring" and twisting data to fit his conclusions, inventing evidence, and ignoring
10431-605: The Philippines and Malaysia ); and the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. In the 1970s, Ivan van Sertima advanced the theory that the complex civilizations of the Americas were the result of trans-oceanic influence from the Egyptians or other African civilizations. Such a claim is his primary thesis in They Came Before Columbus , published in 1978. The few hyper-diffusionist writers seek to establish that
10614-643: The Siddi , Sheedi , Makrani and Sri Lanka Kaffirs . In some cases, they became very prominent, such as Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut , Hoshu Sheedi , Malik Ambar , or the rulers of Janjira State . The Mauritian creole people are the descendants of African slaves similar to those in the Americas. The Siddi ( pronounced [sɪd̪d̪i] ), also known as the Sheedi , Sidi , Siddhi , or Habshi , are an ethnic group inhabiting India and Pakistan . Members are mostly descended from
10797-405: The Underground Railroad , a system supported by both blacks and whites to assist fugitive slaves. After achieving independence, northern states in the U.S. had begun to abolish slavery as early as 1793, but slavery was not abolished in the South until 1865, following the American Civil War . Black immigration to Canada in the twentieth century consisted mostly of Caribbean descent. As a result of
10980-403: The United States who do not reflect on the mainstream African-American community. Mainstream anthropologists determine that the Andamanese and others are part of a network of autochthonous ethnic groups present in South Asia that trace their genetic ancestry to a migratory sequence that culminated in the Australian Aboriginals rather than from Africa directly. Genetic testing has shown
11163-439: The University of Tehran , states that Eurocentric thought exists in almost all aspects of academia in many parts of the world, especially in the humanities. Edgar Alfred Bowring states that in the West, self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the 'Other' run more deeply and those tendencies have infected more aspects of their thinking, laws and policy than anywhere else. Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt have measured
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#173287675719511346-408: The whole surface of the globe ; Western scholars carried out fundamental research into all the languages of the world and established the sciences of archaeology and anthropology . During the European colonial era , encyclopaedias often sought to give a rationale for the predominance of European rule during the colonial period by referring to a special position taken by Europe compared to
11529-453: The "Black", homogeneous hypothesis. Despite contestations, UNESCO decided to include his "Origin of the ancient Egyptians" in the General History of Africa, with an editorial comment mentioning the disagreement. However, Diop's chapter was credited as a "painstakingly researched contribution" in the general conclusion of the symposium report by the International Scientific Committee's Rapporteur, Professor Jean Devisse, which nevertheless lead to
11712-442: The 1510s and participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan . Africans had been present in Asia and Europe long before Columbus's travels. In the late 20th century, Africans began to emigrate to Europe and the Americas in increasing numbers, constituting new African diaspora communities not directly connected with the slave trade. The African Union defined the African diaspora as "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside
11895-441: The 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil , the United States , Colombia and Haiti . However, the term can also be used to refer to African descendants who immigrated to other parts of the world. Scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa. The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from
12078-408: The 1920s. The term was popularised (in French as européocentrique ) in the context of decolonization and internationalism in the mid-20th century. English usage of Eurocentric as an ideological term in identity politics was current by the mid-1980s. The abstract noun Eurocentrism (French eurocentrisme , earlier europocentrisme ) as the term for an ideology was coined in the 1970s by
12261-450: The 1970s, Molefi Kete Asante appropriated the term, insisting that he was the only person equipped to define it, and asserting that even the holy archangels Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop had an imperfect and immature grasp of a concept that finds ultimate expression in his own pontifications. Subsequently, it became a catchall "floating signifier," nebulous, unstable, and infinitely mutable. Literature and languages scholar Cain Hope Felder ,
12444-446: The 1970s. In strict terms Afrocentrism, as a distinct historiography, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. Today it is primarily associated with Cheikh Anta Diop , John Henrik Clarke , Ivan van Sertima and Molefi Kete Asante . Asante, however, describes his theories as Afrocentricity . Proponents of Afrocentrism support the claim that the contributions of various Black African people have been downplayed or discredited as part of
12627-555: The 19th century. The coinage of Western-centrism is younger, attested in the late 1990s, and specific to English. According to historian Enrique Dussel , Eurocentrism has its roots in Hellenocentrism . Art historian and critic Christopher Allen points out that since antiquity, the outward-looking spirit of Western civilization has been more curious about other peoples and more open about learning about them than any other: Herodotus and Strabo travelled through Ancient Egypt and wrote about it in detail; Western explorers mapped
12810-495: The African and (western) Asiatic influence on ancient Greek culture. In 2000, African American Studies professor Molefi Kete Asante , gave a lecture entitled "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium," in which he presented many of his ideas: Asante also stated: As a cultural configuration, the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five characteristics: However, Wilson J. Moses, said of Asante: "His second book, The Afrocentric Idea (1987),
12993-440: The African diaspora as a mere dispersion of African people. For them, it is a movement of liberation that opposes the implications of racialization . Their position assumes that Africans and their descendants abroad struggle to reclaim power over their lives through voluntary migration, cultural production and political conceptions and practices. It also implies the presence of cultures of resistance with similar objectives throughout
13176-509: The African diaspora. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by limiting their awareness of themselves and indoctrinating them with ideas that work against them. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-determination in relationship to others. Like educational leaders of other cultures , proponents assert that what educates one group of people does not necessarily educate and empower another group–so they assert educational priorities distinctly for
13359-414: The African past for a re-evaluation of what its civilizations had achieved and what they meant for contemporary people. The combination of the European centuries gives us about four to five hundred years of solid European domination of intellectual concepts and philosophical ideas. Africa and Asia were subsumed under various headings of the European hierarchy. If a war between the European powers occurred it
13542-521: The African-American community nationwide. About 57 percent immigrated between 1990 and 2000. Immigrants born in Africa constitute 1.6 percent of the black population. People of the African immigrant diaspora are the most educated population group in the United States—50 percent have bachelor's or advanced degrees, compared to 23 percent of native-born Americans. The largest African immigrant communities in
13725-436: The Africans in a given context. The black church in the United States developed out of the creolization of African spirituality and European-American Christianity ; early members of the churches made certain stories their own. During the antebellum years, the idea of deliverance out of slavery , as in the story of Exodus , was especially important. After Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy, their hope
13908-418: The Americas , sometimes as free people of color , but the majority were enslaved . Demand of African labor increased as the indigenous population of the Americas experienced a massive population decline due to the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases (such as smallpox ) to which they had no natural immunity . The Spanish Crown granted asientos (monopoly contracts) to merchants granting them
14091-558: The Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade . Beginning in 1791, the Haitian Revolution , a slave rebellion by self-emancipated slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue eventually led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti . The new state, led by Jean Jacques Dessalines was the first nation in the Americas to be established from a successful slave revolt and represented
14274-692: The Americas, as well as relocations within the Americas, have brought people of African descent to North America. According to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture , the first African populations came to North America in the 16th century via Mexico and the Caribbean to the Spanish colonies of Florida , Texas and other parts of the South. Out of the 12 million people from Africa who were shipped to
14457-693: The Ancient Egyptian population and described the skeletal morphologies of early dynastic Egyptian remains as a "Saharo-tropical African variant". He also noted that over time gene flow from the Near East and Europe added more genetic variability to the region. In 2022, Keita argued that some genetic studies have a "default racialist or racist approach" and should be interpreted in a framework with other sources of evidence. Several other academics, including Christopher Ehret , Fekri Hassan , Bruce Williams, Frank Yurco , Molefi Kete Asante , Lanny Bell and A.J. Boyce across various disciplines have contended that Ancient Egypt
14640-714: The Andamani to belong to the Y-Chromosome Haplogroup D-M174 , which is in common with Australian Aboriginals and the Ainu people of Japan rather than the actual African diaspora. The Kingdom of Aksum was an ancient empire in what is now northern Ethiopia . There were four invasions and subsequent settlements of Aksumites in Himyar , located across the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen . These invasions and settlements led to one of
14823-855: The Black Egyptian hypothesis as a source of black pride have been called "the hoteps " (after the Egyptian word hotep ). The term has often been used disparagingly by non-hotep African-Americans, some of whom have linked the ideology of the hotep community – which is anti-feminist , anti-gay and anti-Semitic – to the far-right . Hoteps have been described as promoting false histories and misinformation about black people and black history. Some have argued hotep beliefs are too narrow-minded (focusing only on Egypt as opposed to other aspects of African history ), and black feminists argue that hoteps perpetuate rape culture by policing women's sexuality and not criticizing predatory black men. Among Afrocentrists
15006-630: The Byzantine Empire against Persia . The overtures made by the Byzantine Empire to influence Himyar demonstrate that the Aksumite settlers in Himyar, due to their sustained residence and political organization, constituted a "stable community in exile," which historian Carlton Wilson deems a necessary condition to classify a settlement as a diaspora. Justinian had two wishes for this proposed alliance: first, for Aksum to purchase and distribute Indian silk to
15189-555: The Caribbean. Beyond the region, a new Afro-Caribbean diaspora, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc in the United States, was influential in the creation of the black power and hip hop movements. Influential political theorists such as Walter Rodney , Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall contributed to anti-colonial theory and movements in Africa, as well as cultural developments in Europe. Several migration waves to
15372-568: The Civil War era. Bernstein posits that the choices made by the subjects of the Clark doll tests were not necessarily an indication of black self-hatred. Instead, it was a cultural choice between two different toys—one that was to be loved and one that was to be physically harassed, as exemplified in performance and popular media. According to Bernstein, this argument "redeems the Clarks' child subjects by offering
15555-685: The Egyptian Marxian economist Samir Amin , then director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa . Amin used the term in the context of a global, core–periphery or dependency model of capitalist development. English usage of Eurocentrism is recorded by 1979. According to Amin, Eurocentrism dates back to the Rennaisance, and did not flourish until
15738-562: The Greek διασπορά ( diaspora , "scattering") which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations. Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from Africa. The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as consisting: "of people of native or partial African origin living outside
15921-648: The Islamic world . Stemming from Eurocentrism's innate bias towards Western civilization came the creation of the concept of the "European Society," which favoured the components (mainly Christianity) of European civilization and allowed eurocentrists to brand diverging societies and cultures as "uncivilized". Prevalent during the nineteenth century, the labelling of uncivilised in the eyes of eurocentrists enabled Western countries to classify non-European and non-white countries as inferior, and limit their inclusion and contribution in actions like international law. This exclusion
16104-694: The Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles . They mainly live in the islands of Aruba , Bonaire , Curaçao and Saint Martin , the latter of which is also partly French-controlled. Many Afro-Dutch people reside in the Netherlands . As of 2021, there were at least 232,000 people of recent Native African immigrant background living in Portugal . They mainly live in the regions of Lisbon , Porto , Coimbra . As Portugal doesn't collect information dealing with ethnicity,
16287-478: The Protestant western countries, and a series of generalised and universal cultural phenomena only appear in the west. Even the state, with a written constitution and a government organised by trained administrators and constrained by rational law, only appears in the West, even though other regimes can also comprise states. ("Rationality" is a multi-layered term whose connotations are developed and escalated as with
16470-631: The Roman Emperor Nero filled a theater with Aithiopian slaves to demonstrate the wealth and power of Rome to a visiting foreign king. At the beginning of the 8th century, Arabs took African slaves from the central and eastern portions of the African continent (where they were known as the Zanj ) and sold them into markets in the Middle East , the Indian subcontinent , and the Far East , for slavery in
16653-663: The UNESCO-sponsored conference on the General History of Africa in 1974 "did not change the Eurocentric climate of research" and of the need to incorporate both African-centred studies and White European, academic perspectives. He later outlined that "research conferences and publications on the history and language of Kemet [Egypt] remain dominated ... by those brought up and trained in European, not African societies and languages (which include Arabic)". African-Americans who use
16836-658: The US American civil rights movement . According to U.S. professor Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, concepts of Afrocentricity lie at the core of disciplines such as African American studies . But Wilson J. Moses claims that Afrocentrism roots are not exclusively African: Despite the fulminations of ethno-chauvinists and other prejudiced persons, it remains a fact that the contributions of white scholars, like Boas, Malinowski, and Herskovits, were fundamental to that complex of ideas that we designate to days as Afrocentrism...Students of African and African American history have long appreciated
17019-614: The Umayyad Caliphate , the Abbasid Caliphate , the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire . Beginning in the early 15th century, Europeans captured or bought African slaves from West Africa and brought them first to Europe and then, after the start of European colonization there in the late 15th century, to the Americas. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 19th century. The dispersal through slave trading represents
17202-554: The United States are in New York , followed by California , Texas , and Maryland . Due to the legacy of slavery in the colonial history of the United States , the average African American has a significant European component to his DNA. According to a study conducted in 2011, the African American DNA consists on average of 73.2% West African, 24% European and 0.8% Native American DNA. The European ancestry of African Americans
17385-505: The United States, there was historically a greater European colonial population in relation to African slaves , especially in the Northern Tier . There was considerable racial intermarriage in colonial Virginia , and other forms of racial mixing during the slavery and post- Civil War years. Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws passed after the 1863–1877 Reconstruction era in the South in
17568-489: The activism of African American intellectuals in the U.S. civil rights movement and in the development of African American studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography. A notable pioneer is the professor Kenneth Dike , who became chairman of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard in
17751-494: The ancestry of ancient Egypt as being a part of the native and diverse biological variation of Africa, which includes a variety of phenotypes and skin gradients. Egyptian Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has gone on record as saying that the Ancient Egyptians were not black and “We believe that the origin of Ancient Egyptians was purely Egyptian based on the discovery made by British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie at Naqada, and this
17934-505: The blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular—the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as
18117-532: The center of forces that created the modern world. Paul Gilroy describes the suppression of blackness due to imagined and created ideals of nations as "cultural insiderism." Cultural insiderism is used by nations to separate deserving and undeserving groups and requires a "sense of ethnic difference" as mentioned in his book The Black Atlantic . Recognizing their contributions offers a comprehensive appreciation of global history. Cultural and political theorist Richard Iton suggested that diaspora be understood as
18300-692: The chance to study in Russia; over 40 years, 400,000 African students came, and some settled there. Afro-Turks are people of Zanj ( Bantu ) descent living in Turkey . Like the Afro-Abkhazians , they trace their origins to the Ottoman slave trade . Beginning several centuries ago, a number of Africans came to the Ottoman Empire , usually via Zanzibar as Zanj and from places such as present-day Niger , Saudi Arabia , Libya , Kenya and Sudan ; they settled by
18483-409: The character Daggoo , an African harpooneer, is recorded in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick . They eventually took their trade to California . Today 1.7 million people in the United States are descended from voluntary immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom arrived in the late twentieth century. African immigrants represent 6 percent of all immigrants to the United States and almost 5 percent of
18666-518: The children chose the white doll; they also stated that it looked like them. The people who carried out the study noted that Eurocentrism is deeply rooted in different cultures, including Latin cultures. Skin lightening has become a common practice in some countries. A 2011 study found that, in Tanzania , motivation for the use of skin lightening products is to look more 'European'. However, in East Asia,
18849-425: The concept of eurocentrism has evolved. Alina Sajed and John Hobson point to the emergence of a critical eurocentrism, stressing that 'while [critical IR theory] is certainly critical of the West, nevertheless its tendency towards "Eurofetishism" –by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency– leads it into a "critical Eurocentrism". Expanding on their work, Audrey Alejandro has put forward
19032-465: The context of decolonization and development and humanitarian aid that industrialised countries offered to developing countries. The term has since been used to critique Western narratives of progress , Western scholars who have downplayed and ignored non-Western contributions, and to contrast Western epistemologies with Indigenous epistemologies . The adjective Eurocentric , or Europe-centric , has been in use in various contexts since at least
19215-522: The continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union". Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union". Many Africans dispersed throughout North America , South America , Europe , and Asia during
19398-477: The continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union." Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million enslaved Africans were transported to island plantations in
19581-449: The cultures and civilizations of the Islamic world, but also the aspects and ideas of Orientalism , a cultural idea that distinguished the "Orient" of the East from the " Occidental " Western societies of Europe and North America, and which was originally created so that the social and cultural milestones of the Islamic and Oriental world would be recognised. This effect began to take place during
19764-682: The current scientific consensus that holds that Africans exhibit a range of types and physical characteristics, and that such elements as wavy hair or aquiline facial features are part of a continuum of African types that do not depend on admixture with Caucasian groups. They cite work by Hiernaux and Hassan that they believe demonstrates that populations could vary based on micro-evolutionary principles ( climate adaptation , drift, selection), and that such variations existed in both living and fossil Africans. Afrocentrists have condemned what they consider to be attempts at dividing African peoples into racial clusters as new versions of discredited theories, such as
19947-433: The degree of Eurocentrism in the research programs of top history departments. Some authors have focused on how scholars who denounce Eurocentrism often inadvertently reproduce Eurocentrism through culturally bias norm's. The methodologist Audrey Alejandro refers to this process as a "recursive paradox": "It is a methodo-epistemological recursive paradox that [International Relations] critical scholars experience, producing
20130-502: The depth and scope of coverage and concern contrasted with that devoted to longer-running contemporary wars outside Europe such as those in Syria and in Yemen . Eurocentrism has been a particularly important concept in development studies . Brohman (1995) argued that Eurocentrism "perpetuated intellectual dependence on a restricted group of prestigious Western academic institutions that determine
20313-643: The development of capitalism and early industrialization. As a result, by the 19th century European powers dominated world trade and world politics . In Lectures on the Philosophy of History , published in 1837, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw world history as starting in Asia but shifting to Greece and Italy, and then north of the Alps to France, Germany and England. Hegel interpreted India and China as stationary countries, lacking inner momentum. Hegel's China replaced
20496-403: The disciples of the social sciences and history guided by Eurocentrism. He criticised some Western scholars for their ideas that non-Western areas lack outstanding contributions in history, economy, ideology, politics and culture compared with the West. These scholars believed that the same contribution made by the West gives Westerners an advantage of endo-genetic momentum which is pushed towards
20679-545: The discrimination they faced. The tested children also labelled the white dolls with positive descriptions. One of the criticisms of this experiment is presented by Robin Bernstein, a professor of African and African American studies and women, gender, and sexuality, who argues that the Clarks' tests were scientifically flawed, though they did reflect a negative portrayal of black dolls in American theater and media that dates back to
20862-437: The domination of European powers across the continent meant African history was written from an entirely European perspective under the pretence of Western superiority supported by scientific racism . Oral sources were deprecated and dismissed by unfamiliar historians, giving them the impression that Africa had no history nor desire to create it. Despite a movement in the mid to late 20th century towards utilising oral sources in
21045-415: The dualistic properties that it labels on non-European countries, cultures and persons have often been criticised in the political discourse of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in the greater context of political correctness , race in the United States and affirmative action . In the 1990s, there was a trend of criticising various geographic terms current in the English language as Eurocentric, such as
21228-797: The earliest black presence in Canada came from the newly independent United States after the American Revolution; the British resettled African Americans (known as Black Loyalists ) primarily in Nova Scotia . These were primarily former slaves who had escaped to British lines for promised freedom during the Revolution. Later during the antebellum years, other individual African Americans escaped to Canada, mostly to locations in Southwestern Ontario , via
21411-427: The enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy , and history. Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from
21594-417: The establishment of the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade is often considered the defining element, but people of African descent have engaged in eleven other migration movements involving North America since the 16th century, many being voluntary migrations, although undertaken in exploitative and hostile environments. In the 1860s, people from sub-Saharan Africa , mainly from West Africa and
21777-500: The estimate includes only people that, as of 2021, hold the citizenship of an African country or people who have acquired Portuguese citizenship from 2008 to 2021, thus excluding descendants, people of more distant African ancestry or people who have settled in Portugal generations ago and are now Portuguese citizens . As of 2021, there were 1,206,701 Africans. They mainly live in the regions of Andalusia , Catalonia , Madrid and
21960-512: The eurocentric ideals better by way of orientalism, there came a barrier of languages, being Arabic, Persian, and other similar languages. With more researchers wanting to study more of Orientalism, there was an assumption made about the languages of the Islamic world: that having the ability to transcribe the texts of the past Islamic world would give great knowledge and insight on oriental studies. In order to do this, many researchers underwent training in philology , believing that an understanding of
22143-620: The first large-scale African diasporas in the ancient world. In 517 AD, the Himyarite king Ma'adikarib was overthrown by Dhu Nuwas , a Jewish leader who began persecuting Christians and confiscating trade goods between Aksum and the Byzantine Empire , both of which were Christian nations. According to the Book of the Himyarites , a man identified as Bishop Thomas journeyed to Aksum to report on
22326-497: The global diaspora. Thinkers like W. E. B. Dubois and more recently Robin Kelley , for example, have argued that black politics of survival reveal more about the meaning of the African diaspora than labels of ethnicity and race, and degrees of skin hue. From this view, the daily struggle against what they call the "world-historical processes" of racial colonization, capitalism , and Western domination defines blacks' links to Africa. In
22509-614: The globe varies by region, with Eurocentric ideals having a relatively strong impact in South Asia but little to no impact in East Asia. However, Eurocentric beauty ideals have also been on the decline in the United States, especially with the success of Asian female models, which may be signaling a breakdown in the hegemony of White American beauty ideals. In Vietnam, Eurocentric beauty ideals have been openly rejected, as local women consider Western women's ideal of beauty as being overweight, masculine and unattractive. Another study questioning
22692-503: The gold mines of the Department of Antioquia. After this was no longer a profitable business, these slaves slowly moved to the Pacific coast, where they have remained unmixed with the white or Indian population until today. The whole Department of Chocó remains a black area. Mixture with white population happened mainly in the Caribbean coast, which is a mestizo area until today. There was also
22875-419: The great Library at Alexandria as James suggested, because the library was founded after Aristotle's death. On the basis of such errors, Lefkowitz calls Afrocentrism "an excuse to teach myth as history." Mary Lefkowitz in 1997 whilst criticising elements of Afrocentrism had acknowledged that the origins of the ancient Egyptians were more clear due to the "recent evidence on skeletons and DNA [which] suggests that
23058-462: The historians revolving their conclusions around the idea of a central point that favours the notion that the evolution of societies and their progress are dictated by general tendencies, leading to the Islamic world's evolution becoming more of a philosophical topic of history instead of historical fact. Along with this, eurocentrism extends to trivialise and marginalise the philosophies, scientific contributions, cultures, and other additional facets of
23241-415: The history and cultures of colonialism at Bristol University, writes that contrary to "Afrocentric speculation, depending on undocumented assertions that the relatively light-skinned people of the lower Nile today descend from Arab conquerors rather than earlier residents". Howe also cited a 1995 publication which stated "the latest major synthetic work on African populations is firmly of the opinion that "It
23424-598: The history of the whole of humankind from an Afrocentric point of view. The result is a new reconstruction of world history: it is a universal history. Other critics, such as Mary Lefkowitz , contend that the Afrocentric historical approach is entrenched in myth and fantasy. She argues that Afrocentrism is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than sound scholarship. In The Skeptic's Dictionary , philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll labeled Afrocentrism " pseudohistorical ". He argued that Afrocentrism's prime goal
23607-441: The idea of a postcolonial eurocentrism, understood as an emerging form of Eurocentrism that follows the criteria of Eurocentrism commonly mentioned in the literature – denial of 'non-Western' agency, teleological narrative centred on the 'West' and idealization of the 'West' as normative referent—but whose system of value is the complete opposite of the one embodied by traditional Eurocentrism: With postcolonial Eurocentrism, Europe
23790-495: The impact of Eurocentric beauty ideals in South Asia noted that Indian women won a relatively high number of international beauty pageants, and that Indian media tends to use mostly Indian female models. The authors cite the dominance of the Bollywood film industry in India, which tends to minimize the impact of Western ideals. In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted experiments called "the doll tests" to examine
23973-410: The impact of Eurocentrism in beauty advertisements has been minimal. Anti-European undercurrents in local advertisements for female-oriented products are quite common. European models are hired for around half of advertisements made by European brands such as Estée Lauder and L'Oréal , while local Japanese cosmetics brands tend to use exclusively East Asian female models. In Singapore, a country with
24156-497: The introduction to an 1813 Spanish poem celebrating the defenders of Zaragoza , in which the author claimed an Arabic origin of the term. In the 20th century it was popularized by Yosef Ben-Jochannan , though this is sometimes incorrectly credited to Cheikh Anta Diop in a non-existent book called “The Kemetic History of Afrika”. Afrocentrism has encountered opposition from mainstream scholars who charge it with historical inaccuracy, scholarly ineptitude, and racism. Yaacov Shavit ,
24339-512: The irony that much of what we now call Afrocentrism was developed during the 1930s by the Jewish American scholar Melville Herskovits In 1987, Martin Bernal published his Black Athena , in which he claims that ancient Greece was colonized by northern invaders mixing with a colony established by Phoenicia (modern Lebanon). A major theme of the work is the alleged denial by Western academia of
24522-405: The languages would be the only necessary training. This reasoning came as the belief at the time was that other studies like anthropology and sociology were deemed irrelevant as they did not believe it misleading to this portion of mankind. Due to colonialism, Eurocentric beauty ideals have had varying degrees of impact on the cultures of non-Western countries. The influence on beauty ideals across
24705-457: The largest forced migrations in human history. The economic effect on the African continent proved devastating, as generations of young people were taken from their communities and societies were disrupted. Some communities formed by descendants of African slaves in the Americas, Europe, and Asia have survived to the present day. In other cases, native Ethnic groups of Africans intermarried with non-native Africans, and their descendants blended into
24888-399: The last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that Africans played in bringing about modernity. This trend also opposes the traditional eurocentric perspective that has dominated history books showing Africans and its diasporans as primitive victims of slavery, and without historical agency. According to historian Patrick Manning , blacks toiled at
25071-565: The late 18th century as a disproportionate Western interest in and idealization of Eastern (i.e. Asian) cultures. By the early 20th century, some historians, such as Arnold J. Toynbee , were attempting to construct multifocal models of world civilizations. Toynbee also drew attention in Europe to non-European historians, such as the medieval Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun . He also established links with Asian thinkers, such as through his dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International . Authors show that since its first conceptualization,
25254-575: The late 19th and early 20th centuries, following social changes in the United States and Africa due both to the end of slavery and the decline of colonialism . Following the American Civil War , African Americans in the South gathered together in communities to evade white control, established their own church congregations, and worked hard to gain education. They increasingly took more active public roles despite severe racial discrimination and segregation. American and African intellectuals looked to
25437-463: The late-19th century, plus waves of vastly increased immigration from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, maintained much distinction between racial groups. In the early-20th century, to institutionalize racial segregation , most southern states adopted the " one drop rule ", which defined and recorded anyone with any discernible African ancestry as "black", even those of obvious majority native European or of majority-Native-American ancestry. One of
25620-591: The later Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia . Scholars who have held this view include Marcus Garvey , George James , Martin Bernal , Ivan van Sertima , John Henrik Clarke , and Molefi Kete Asante as well as the Afrocentrist writers Cheikh Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams . The claim has also been made by many Afrocentric scholars that the Ancient Egyptians themselves were Black African (sub-saharan African) rather than North African/Maghrebi, and that
25803-679: The legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history". Major critics of Afrocentrism include Mary Lefkowitz , who dismiss it as pseudohistory , reactive, and obstinately therapeutic. Others, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah , believe that Afrocentrism defeats its purpose of dismantling unipolar studies of world history by seeking to replace Eurocentricity with an equally ethnocentric and hierarchical curriculum, and negatively essentializes European culture and people of European descent. Clarence E. Walker claims it to be "Eurocentrism in blackface ". The term "Afrocentrism" dates to 1962. The adjective "Afrocentric" appears in
25986-412: The local population. In the Americas, the confluence of multiple ethnic groups from around the world contributed to multi-ethnic societies. In Central and South America , most people are descended from European, Native American , and African ancestry. In 1888, in Brazil nearly half the population descended from African slaves, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range. In
26169-498: The name 'Alkebulan' (also spelled 'Al Kebulan' or 'Alkebu Lan') is sometimes used a replacement for 'Africa.' Users often erroneously claim that it derives from the Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' (in reality Bilad as-Sudan ), or alternatively that it comes from one or more indigenous African languages and means 'Garden of Life' or 'Motherland'. The earliest record of the term 'Alkebulan' is
26352-524: The new Aksumite king Kaleb first sent a group of Himyarite refugees in his Aksumite kingdom back into Himyar to stir up underground resistance against Dhu Nuwas. These discontented Himyarites then united under nobleman Sumyafa Ashwa . Kaleb successfully invaded Himyar with an Aksumite army in 525 and installed Sumyafa Ashwa to rule. More Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar to claim land. The Byzantine ruler Justinian learned of this development and sent an ambassador, Julianus, to ally Aksum and Himyar with
26535-510: The nineteenth century when the Orientalist ideals were distilled and shifted from topics of sensuality and deviating mentalities to what is described by Edward Said as "unchallenged coherence". Along with this shift came the creation of two types of orientalism: latent, which covered the Orient's constant durability through history, and manifest, a more dynamic orientalism that changes with the new discovery of information. The eurocentric influence
26718-497: The number is larger, though most identify themselves as being of mixed, rather than strictly African, ancestry. In places like Brazil and the Dominican Republic, blackness is performed in more taboo ways than it is in, say, the United States. The idea behind Trey Ellis Cultural Mulatto comes into play as there are blurred lines between what is considered as black. In Colombia , the African slaves were first brought to work in
26901-399: The oral word, contrasted with literate civilisations which pride the written word. Prior to colonisation , most African societies used oral tradition to record their long history, along with their state apparatus such as constitutions and court proceedings, including in cases where they had developed or had adapted a writing script . This meant there was little written history , and
27084-544: The other continents. Thus Johann Heinrich Zedler , in 1741, wrote that "even though Europe is the smallest of the world's four continents , it has for various reasons a position that places it before all others.... Its inhabitants have excellent customs, they are courteous and erudite in both sciences and crafts". The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie ( Conversations-Lexicon ) of 1847 still expressed an ostensibly Eurocentric approach and claimed about Europe that "its geographical situation and its cultural and political significance
27267-600: The passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which have to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History. Most African societies have generally been termed oral civilisations due to their reverence for
27450-420: The people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North". In 2002, Ibrahim Sundiata wrote in the American Historical Review that: The word "Afrocentric" has been traced by Derrick Alridge to the American historian W.E.B. Du Bois, who employed it in the early 1960s. During
27633-493: The persecution of Christians in Himyar to the Aksumite Kingdom. As a result, the Aksumite king Ahayawa invaded Himyar. Dhu Nuwas fled this first invasion, and at least 580 Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar. Himyarites who opposed Aksumite settlement united under Dhu Nuwas, and the formerly expelled king traveled back to kill the Aksumite soldiers and continue the oppression of Christians, forcing some settlers back into Aksum. In response to Dhu Nuwas's Christian persecution,
27816-440: The perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Eurocentric assumptions and myths about world history, in order to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern , and Asian cultural influences while exaggerating certain aspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished
27999-569: The practice began long before exposure to Europeans – tan skin was associated with lower-class field work, and thus constant exposure to sun, while having pale skin signified belonging to the upper-class. Skin bleaching can have negative health effects. One study observed that, among the female population of Senegal in West Africa, 26% of women were using skin lightening creams at the time. The most common products used were hydroquinone and corticosteroids. 75% of women who used these creams showed adverse cutaneous effects, mainly acne . In East Asia,
28182-515: The product was by 'Indians' and 'Negroes'. With the control of commercial capital from 'White' workers. And therefore, Europe or Western Europe emerged as the central place of new patterns and capitalist power. Eurocentrism's effect on the Islamic world has predominantly come from a fundamental statement of preventing the account of lower-level explanation and account of Islamic cultures and their social evolution, mainly through eurocentrism's idealist construct. This construct has gained power from
28365-446: The prominence of Caribbean immigration, the term "African Canadian", while sometimes used to refer to the minority of Canadian blacks who have direct African or African-American heritage, is not normally used to denote black Canadians. Blacks of Caribbean origin are usually denoted as "West Indian Canadian", "Caribbean Canadian" or more rarely "Afro-Caribbean Canadian", but there remains no widely used alternative to "Black Canadian" which
28548-413: The psychological effects of segregation on African-American children. They tested children by presenting them with four dolls, identical in all but skin tone. The children were instructed to choose which doll they preferred and were asked the race of the doll. Most of the children chose the white doll. The Clarks stated in their results that the perceptions of the African-American children had been altered by
28731-496: The real historical development with a fixed, stable scenario, which made it the outsider of world history. Both India and China were waiting and anticipating a combination of certain factors from outside until they could acquire real progress in human civilization . Hegel's ideas had a profound impact on western historiography and attitudes. Some scholars disagree with his ideas that the Oriental countries were outside of world history. Max Weber (1864-1920) suggested that capitalism
28914-431: The remaining "dark spaces" of the globe. The European miracle , a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981, refers to the surprising rise of Europe during the Early Modern period. During the 15th to 18th centuries, a great divergence took place, comprising the European Renaissance, the European Age of Discovery , the formation of European colonial empires , the Age of Reason , and the associated leap forward in technology and
29097-440: The rest of the world, but Frank believed that the Oriental countries also contributed to the human civilization in their own perspectives. Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of History , gave a critical remark on Eurocentrism. He believed that although western capitalism shrouded the world and achieved a political unity based on its economy, the Western countries cannot "westernize" other countries. Toynbee concluded that Eurocentrism
29280-410: The results of this implementation was the loss of records of Native-identified groups, who were classified only as black because of being mixed-race. From the very onset of Spanish exploration and colonial activities in the Americas, Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionary and as slave laborers. Juan Garrido was such an African conquistador . He crossed the Atlantic as a freedman in
29463-591: The right to supply enslaved Africans in to Spanish colonies in the Americas, regulating the trade. As other European nations began establishing colonies in the Americas, these new colonies began importing enslaved Africans as well. During the 17th and 18th centuries, most European colonies in the Caribbean operated on plantation economies fueled by slave labor, and the resulting importation of enslaved Africans meant that Afro-Caribbeans soon far outnumbered their European enslavers in terms of population. Roughly eleven to twelve million enslaved Africans were transported to
29646-421: The same origin: By way of distinction, Afrocentricity should not be confused with the variant Afrocentrism. The term “Afrocentrism” was first used by the opponents of Afrocentricity who in their zeal saw it as an obverse of Eurocentrism. The adjective “Afrocentric” in the academic literature always referred to “Afrocentricity.” However, the use of “Afrocentrism” reflected a negation of the idea of Afrocentricity as
29829-591: The scientific evidence for the physical diversity of Africans". Smith, however, expressed criticism of Egyptologists and Afrocentrists that defined ancient Egyptians "as members of an essentialist racial category" with perceived "Caucasoid" or "Negroid/Africoid" phenotypes". As historian Ronald H. Fritze argued, mainstream Egyptologists and other scholars strongly object to Afrocentric Egyptology, viewing it as "theurapetic mythology" for black people, since it fails to provide sufficient evidence or persuasive interpretations to back up its claims. Stephen Howe, professor in
30012-502: The social progress. Weber regarded rationality as a proprietary article for western capitalist society.) Even in the 19th century, anticolonial movements had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe in Africa and India. In some cases, as China, where local ideology was even more exclusionist than the Eurocentric one, Westernization did not overwhelm longstanding Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality. Orientalism developed in
30195-470: The subject matter and methods of research". In treatises on historical or contemporary Eurocentrism that appeared since the 1990s, Eurocentrism is mostly cast in terms of dualisms such as civilised/barbaric or advanced/backward, developed/undeveloped, core/periphery, implying "evolutionary schemas through which societies inevitably progress", with a remnant of an "underlying presumption of a superior white Western self as referent of analysis." Eurocentrism and
30378-491: The traditional division of Eurasia into Europe and Asia or the term Middle East. Eric Sheppard , in 2005, argued that contemporary Marxism itself has Eurocentric traits (in spite of "Eurocentrism" originating in the vocabulary of Marxian economics), because it supposes that the third world must go through a stage of capitalism before "progressive social formations can be envisioned". Andre Gunder Frank harshly criticised Eurocentrism. He believed that most scholars were
30561-526: The two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude that maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race. French historian Jean Vercoutter has claimed that archaeological workers routinely classified Negroid remains as Mediterranean, even though they found such remains in substantial numbers with ancient artefacts. Some Afrocentrists have adopted
30744-416: The two terms are often confused to mean the same, Afrocentrists are not adherents of Afrocentrism. This has caused confusing notions about who is considered an Afrocentrist, as various scholars who may or may not be associated with Asante and his works have been erroneously given the title, even by other academics. Asante has written that Afrocentricity and Afrocentrism are not the same and neither do they share
30927-448: The use of Western female models entirely, while others have even portrayed white women as explicitly inferior to Asian women, on the basis of their lighter hair color. There is a widespread belief in Japan that Japanese women's skin color is "better" than white women's, and the placement of European female models in local advertisements does not reflect any special status of white women within Japan. The beauty ideal for females in Brazil
31110-441: The various invasions on Egypt resulted in the "Africanity" of Ancient Egypt becoming diluted, resulting in the modern diversity seen today. Examining this view, Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith , wrote that "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study. Thus, by modern American standards it is reasonable to characterise the Egyptians as 'black', while acknowledging
31293-499: The work of certain anthropologists who have suggested that there is little evidence to support that the first North African populations were closely related to "Caucasoids" of Europe and western Asia. In 1964 Afrocentric scholar Cheikh Anta Diop expressed a belief in such a double standard: But it is only the most gratuitous theory that considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognising as white only
31476-510: The work of respected Central and South American scholars to advance his own theory. Mainstream historians of Mesoamerica overwhelmingly reject that view with detailed rebuttals. Claims have been also forwarded contending that African civilizations were founding influences on the Chinese Xia cultures. Several Afrocentrists have claimed that important cultural characteristics of ancient Egypt were indigenous to Africa and that these features were present in other early African civilizations such as
31659-479: The world stage. The Jamaican Marcus Garvey formed the UNIA movement in the United States, continuing with Aimé Césaire 's négritude movement, which was intended to create a pan-African movement across national lines. From the 1960s, the decolonization of the Americas led to various Caribbean countries gaining their independence from European colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as calypso , reggae music , and Rastafari within
31842-423: Was a creative and in some respects brilliant but rambling theoretical work, much influenced by the revolution in " critical theory " that occurred in American intellectual life during the late 1970s and early 1980s." Some also assert that the definition of Afrocentricity has never sat still long enough to be properly described and accurately critiqued. Afrocentric education is education designed to empower peoples of
32025-436: Was based on deliverance from segregation and other abuses. They found much to respond to in the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus , and shaped their churches by the growth of music and worship styles that related to African as well as European-American traditions. Twentieth-century "Africentric approaches" to Christian theology and preaching have been more deliberate. Writers and thinkers emphasize "Black presence" in
32208-405: Was called a World War and the Asians and Africans found their way on the side of one European power or the other. There was this sense of assertiveness about European culture that advanced with Europe's trade, religious, and military forces. As an ideology and political movement, Afrocentrism had its beginnings in activism among black intellectuals, political figures, and historians in the context of
32391-410: Was found that 29 collected official statistics on country of birth, 37 on citizenship, 24 on religion, 26 on language, 6 on country of birth of parents, and 22 on nationality or ethnicity. Estimates of 3 to 5 million of African descent, although one quarter of the Afro-French population live in overseas territories. This number is difficult to estimate because the French census does not use race as
32574-470: Was fundamentally an African civilization, with cultural and biological connections to Egypt's African neighbors. Scholars have challenged the various assertions of Afrocentrists on the cultural and biological characteristics of Ancient Egyptian civilization and its people. At a UNESCO Symposium in the 1970s, some of the participants, including Jean Vercoutter , Serge Sauneron , Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh and Jean Leclant expressed "profound" disagreement with
32757-407: Was not the Arabs physically displaced Egyptians. Instead the Egyptians were transformed by relatively small number of immigrants bringing in new ideas, which, when disseminated, created a wider ethnic identity". S.O.Y. Keita, a biological anthropologist and research affilitate at the Smithsonian Institution who has been described as sympathetic to Afrocentrism, but defined his position as that "it
32940-415: Was seen as acceptable by individuals like John Westlake , a professor of international law at the University of Cambridge at the time, who commented that countries with European civilizations should be those which comprise the international society, and that countries like Turkey and Persia should only be allowed a part of international law. Eurocentrism's reach has not only affected the perception of
33123-440: Was the African princeling Abram Petrovich Gannibal , who became Peter's protégé, was educated as a military engineer in France, and eventually became general-en-chef, responsible for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia. During the 1930s fifteen Black American families moved to the Soviet Union as agricultural experts. As African states became independent in the 1960s, the Soviet Union offered their citizens
33306-427: Was to "give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society." Many Afrocentrists seek to challenge concepts such as white privilege , color-blind perspectives, and race-neutral pedagogies. There are strong ties between Afrocentricity and Critical race theory . Afrocentrists agree with
33489-619: Was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride in order to effectively combat the destructive consequences of cultural and universal racism. Professor of history Clarence E. Walker has described Afrocentrism as "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face." Classicist Mary Lefkowitz rejects George James 's theories about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship. She writes that ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz states that Aristotle could not have stolen his ideas from
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