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.
Keita’s book appeared in the same year and from the same publisher as Mia Bay’s excellent The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925, which employs numerous well-known primary and secondary sources that were equally available to, but unmentioned, by Keita. Astonishingly he slights St. Clair Drake’s two-volume Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (1987), arguably the most authoritative treatment of the black “vindicationist” tradition with its gentle mockery of Afrocentric enthusiasms and Egyptocentric extravagances. He refers to opinion pieces by K. Anthony Appiah, Mary Lefkowitz, and George Will, but Stephen Howe’s sneeringly brilliant Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (1998), with its condescending but erudite survey of the historiography, is ignored.
Keita correctly asserts that the construction of modern racism is a product of Enlightenment science as it developed in the eighteenth century. One recalls Daniel J. Boorstin’s brief treatment of the topic in The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948) and Thomas Gossett’s in Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963). Indeed “scientific” racism was so pervasive by the 1780s that J. G. Herder, J. F. Blumenbach, and Anders Sparrman found it necessary to challenge at least some of its assumptions, while G. L. Buffon, Jefferson, and Joseph Priestley contributed to others. Black readers in later years welcomed translations of Count Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Meditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791) and Abbé Grégoire’s De la Littérature des Negres (1809). Such works bolstered the vindicationism of Edward Wilmot Blyden and the writings of the once-enslaved autodidact, John E. Bruce, in Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World. Bruce remarkably eludes Keita’s attention, as does William H. Ferris, a member of the American Negro Academy and of Garvey’s inner circle, whose The African Abroad (1913) I have treated elsewhere. Also neglected is Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s readily available and widely discussed Wonderful Ethiopians (1926).
Although its title promises more than it delivers, this work has strengths that will make it necessary reading for students of African American history. The chapter on W. L. Hansbury is an insightful treatment of an inexcusably neglected scholar. The subtly ironic essay on Frank Snowden lays bare the contradictions in the admittedly distinguished work of its subject. Keita’s book demonstrates hard work, common sense, and a great deal of original brilliance.
Wilson J. Moses
Pennsylvania State University