| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 313. Cloth $54.95, paper $17.95.

Wilson Jeremiah Moses brilliantly recovers the attempts of black intellectuals—among them Maria Stewart, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass during slavery, and W. E. B. Du Bois, J. A. Rogers, and St. Clair Drake in our time—to counter racist versions of the African past by claiming impressive black influence in ancient Egypt. "The Afrocentric tradition," he writes, "is related to utopian ideas of progress because it promises a glorious destiny for African people" (p. 42). In particular, Moses enables us to see how pivotal Egypt has been in African-American thought about history, especially among black nationalists. But he further demonstrates that although African-American writers turned to ancient Egypt as a source of pride, rarely have they invoked the history of modern Africa to counter charges of African inferiority. 1

This book will be controversial because issues currently being hotly debated in academic and non-academic circles receive sustained attention from Moses. Moreover, he places writers into ill-defined categories, at times leaving them with little shared apart from an interest in African history. Since the dominant Afrocentric designation probably dates in time no earlier than the 1960s and multiculturalism even later, those designations are not easily applied to earlier periods. Still, Moses's discussion, based on imaginative research, of the uses to which black writers have put Egyptian history, especially in the nineteenth century, establishes him as today's unquestioned leader in this realm of scholarship. . . .

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