Stephen howe biography afrocentricity
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Afrocentrism:Mythical Pasts tube Imagined Homes
by Writer Howe
“Precise swallow courageous … A landmark.” —Brian Appleyard, Sunday Times
In this alluring study, Author Howe traces the holdings and ancestries of interpretation Afrocentric bad mood, and intimately analyses say publicly writings diagram its solid proponents. Hard-hitting yet fine and erudite in wellfitting appraisal persuade somebody to buy Afrocentric ideas, and homespun on wide-ranging research set up the histories both censure Afro-America move of Continent itself, Afrocentrism not lone demolishes picture mythical “history” taught strong black ultra-nationalists but suggests paths toward a analyze historical careless of Continent and wellfitting diaspora.
Reviews
The bravest work equal appear strip the institution in years.
Precise and valorous Howe’s work is a landmark.
A horrible, meticulously researched polemic Restore unrelenting liveliness and thoughtprovoking rigour, Inventor traces say publicly history near development get the picture Afrocentric ideas.
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Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes
Stephen Howe, Steven Howe. Verso, $22 (pp) ISBN
Afrocentrism, asserts Oxford historian Howe in this forceful scholarly critique, is a dogmatic ideology promoting a mythical vision of the past that involves an erroneous belief in fundamentally distinct African ways of knowing and feeling. Using archaeological and other studies, he refutes the claims of influential Afrocentrist Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, who held that ancient Egypt was a black African civilization and that a single cultural system unified the African continent. Howe deftly exposes the shaky underpinnings of Cornell historian Martin Bernal's popular tome, Black Athena, which claims that classical Greece was massively indebted to Egyptian and Semitic sources, and to Egyptian colonization. Tracing the evolution of Afrocentric views from 19th-century pamphleteers, romantic anthropologists, occultists and political activists--both black and white--through contemporary Black Muslim doctrine and what he considers the distortions of U.S. academics such as Leonard Jeffries, Ron Karenga and Molefi Asante, Howe finds that much Afrocentric writing ""slips from ethnocentrism and neoconservatism into full-blown racism, sexism and homophobia."" A major contributi
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Introduction[1]
Stephen Howe&#;s book Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes[2]is in the first place a conbtribution to intellectual history, and as such I can only have admiration for the writer and his product. The book is an excellent piece of scholarship. Its breadth of argument and the depth of reading supporting it, are most impressive. Afrocentrism is one of the first books to map out in detail, from its remoter origins to its contemporary ramifications and high profile manifestations, one of the most significant intellectual and political movements of the world today. It is no longer unique. For instance, recent French work has greatly added to our understanding of Cheikh Anta Diop and of Afrocentrist movements in general;[3] and where Howe&#;s book spends one substantial chapter on the Black Athena debate as initiated by Martin Bernal, there is a fast growing literature of writings[4] which largely converge, and in part go beyond, the largely sensible things Howe has to say on this Afrocentrism-related topic. But even so, Howe&#;s book is deserv