Page 132 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

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ers of the age, directly challenged the notion of Western History). Notably, while the Afrocentric perspective has
cultural primacy with such essays as “What is Civiliza- helped to undermine notions of white superiority, it has
tion” (1926). Both scholars did much to undermine the not made a break with, but rather has embraced, an
notion that Africans were without history. overtly racial notion of historical analysis. Indeed, more
Also of early significance was the Senegalese scientist extreme exponents of Afrocentrism have argued that
and historian Cheikh Anta Diop, whose doctoral disser- only those of African descent can truly understand, and
tation at the Sorbonne created a sensation in the 1950s hence study, African history. In a scholarly world that
by arguing that the ancient Egyptians had been black, increasingly sees race as a social construction, such essen-
rather than white. Diop’s work became a foundational tialist frameworks have become less and less popular.
element of the Afrocentic perspective on Africa, which
argues that there was a coherent black civilization that The Rise of Area Studies
had its roots in ancient Egypt. Afrocentrism has increas- In the 1950s, the rise of area studies programs helped to
ingly come to represent a counterpoint to Eurocentrism. further undermine the old Eurocentric models of world
Indeed, other Afrocentric scholars, such as George James, history. In the United States, the creation of a number of
have even carried the argument further, making the case government-subsidized African studies programs pro-
in Stolen Legacy (1954) that ancient Greek culture, rather vided an institutional foundation for a systematic study
than being a local innovation, was stolen from Egyptian of African history. During the 1950s and 1960s a new
culture. The argument over the relationship (or lack generation of Africanists in Africa, the United States, and
thereof) between Greece and Egypt continues to be a con- Europe helped develop an interdisciplinary historical
tentious one to this day.Witness, for example, the exten- methodology that embraced not only written documents,
sive debate between Martin Bernal (author of Black but also oral histories, linguistics, and archaeology as a
Athena) and Mary Lefkowitz (author of Not Out of Africa:
How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as