| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

W. D. Wright. Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2002. Pp. 244. $64.95.

In this book, W. D. Wright focuses on the development of scholarship dealing with the black historical experience. The author sets forth what he terms a "Black-centric Perspective" to show that black people in the United States "are distinct and different from all other black people on this planet, and are not to be mistaken for any other black people" (p. 20). Black people, he writes, are no longer Africans but rather of black African descent. Affirming the profound influence of W. E. B. Du Bois on his thought, Wright calls himself a Du Boisian historical sociologist. 1

Wright rejects "Afrocentrism" as an interpretive paradigm and the phrase "African Diaspora" on the grounds that the term, usually set forth to mean the dispersal of Africans to the Western Hemisphere, is too narrow. Black Africans were dispersed to the Middle East and Asiaeven before the onset of the European slave trade. The notion of diaspora fails to convey a sense of the "vast global presence" of black Africans and their descendants (p. 17). Wright has devised the concept of "African Extensia" as an alternative framework. This concept envisions recognition of black Africans as the first contributors to world history and of the population movements that took people of that group to southern Africa, to the Middle East and Asia, and also to North and South America. A central problem with Afrocentrism is that black people in America can only claim a black African descent and not an African identity. . . .

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