|
|
|
Book Review
Methods/Theory
Maghan Keita. Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx. (Race and American Culture.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. vii, 214. $45.00.
|
Maghan Keita ably scrutinizes several interwoven topics, most conspicuously, and in his own idiom, "black historiography," the "Afrocentric model of historical writing," and "the epistemology of blackness" (p. 52). The word "Afrocentric" has been traced by Derrick Alridge to W. E. B. Du Bois, who employed it in the early 1960s. During 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, unfalsifiable expression in his own pontifications. Subsequently, it became a catchall "floating signifier," nebulous, unstable, and infinitely mutable. |
. . . |
There are about 362 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|