WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 9 (2006)

Tejumola Olaniyan

(For BJ)

You have all heard of the African Personality; of African democracy, of the African way to socialism, of negritude, and so on. They are all props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up we shan't need any of them any more. But for the moment it is in the nature of things that we may need to counter racism with what Jean-Paul Sartre has called an anti-racist racism, to announce not just that we are as good as the next man but that we are much better.
—Chinua Achebe (Morning Yet 44)

Chinua Achebe, the distinguished novelist, published the famous article, "The Novelist as Teacher," from which I culled the epigraph above, in 1965. He offers in it what still remains a discerning entry into an inquiry on the nature and functions of such social phenomena as Black Aesthetics and Afrocentrism, which he could very well have added to his list of "props" were it not for the circumstances of history which placed the latter two at a later moment. Even so, Achebe included "negritude," a significant lodestar in the genealogy of both black aesthetics and Afrocentrism.

Two principal features of black aesthetics and Afrocentrism—features indispensable for the full grasp of both their form and substance—emerge from Achebe's condensed historicization. First, they are "props . . . fashioned . . . to help us get on our feet again," meaning that they are neither essential nor permanent but consciously fashioned contingent strategies of resistance. They are discourses, discursive means designed to achieve particular ends. To speak of discourse is to speak against the realm of the given and the inevitable and to emphasize instead the enormous transformational work in the construction of social phenomena, their overdetermined and contingent existence. And since no discourse is monologic but most often multiple, dispersed, and contradictory, the realm of the social is replete with agones, scars, and offensive and defensive masks—epic battles for the framing and definition of reality (Macdonell, Foucault).

Second, as contingent strategies of resistance, black aesthetics and Afrocentrism are "re-active" discourses, counter-discourses against the dominant or hegemonic discourses that subordinate them. Specifically, they are racialist or race-based discourses designed to counter the pervasive Euro-American racism against the peoples and cultures of African descent.

Black aesthetics as a programmatic quest began in the United States of America in the last half of the 1960s and lasted until the mid-1970s, while Afrocentrism, its more expansive incarnation, erupted into public and scholarly consciousness in the 1980s and has firmly remained there. Black aesthetics was a product of the twilight of the vulgar institutionalized racism known as "Jim Crow" and of the civil rights struggles, both peaceful and violent, mounted against it. Afrocentrism, on the other hand, emerged in the context of post-civil rights persistence of discrimination and racism of the subtle and therefore most insidious kind. Black aesthetics was the more militant, its "military wing" the Black Power movement, while Afrocentrism has proven to be infinitely more tenacious. Part of its tenacity is derived from the incredible range of field it has declared its legitimate focus, from curricula matters at all levels of the educational system and in all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences to sartorial standards to tour cruise packages; Afrocentrism thus authorized wider cross-class and cross-professional participation. Black aesthetics, on the contrary, was the exclusive project and burden solely of the artists—as the group of cultural workers that uniquely give affective form and measure to a community's ideals of beauty, ethics and politics. It aimed mostly for product—the "black" poem or play or criticism—while Afrocentrism aims mostly for method: the Afrocentric approach to wedding or reading history. The distinctive tone of black aesthetics was querulous; Afrocentrism took it up but significantly lowered the decibel, diverting its energies instead to building institutions where it could be autonomous, or nudging dominant institutions for more elbow room. While black aesthetics argued in the name of blackness, which often intimidated and therefore short-circuited sympathies from a white public as yet not too willing to share their racial privileges, or from blacks who would rather protest in a less confrontational manner, Afrocentrism argues strategically in the name of multiculturalism, a quietly "high moral ground" agenda it shares with other American ethnicities as well as radical and activist groups able to influence public opinion.

The iconoclastic artistic experimentation that surfaced with movement for black aesthetics in the 1960s USA, formally known as the Black Arts Movement, could in a certain sense be regarded as a revolution. In the area of theatre and theatre criticism where black aesthetics some of its fullest articulations, it effected a decisive break from previous practice, a shift, as one critic calls it, from the canon of "the theatre of Negro participation" and "the criticism of Negro sensibility," a blend of "Western bourgeois esthetic criteria and a sentimental racial awareness," to "black theatre" and "the Black Esthetic Criticism," a self-assured advocacy of black "consciousness" undergirded by a determined synthesis of dramaturgical and ideological presuppositions (Jeyifous 34, 40, 35). For instance, the previous era was occupied largely with a "rectification" of the "negative images of the race" produced and circulated by the dominant discourse, while remaining essentially grounded within the same aesthetic structure and vision that produces the lamented images in the first place. Rarely was that ground questioned. This received structure, on the other hand, was in the era of black aesthetics the constant target of interrogation, a structure to move away from if there was to be any possibility of constructing a truly liberating black subjectivity.

Never in the black artistic traditions was there such an irruption whose iconoclasm was so simultaneously inward (an uncompromising critique of black culture itself) and outward (a re-visioning of the relationship with the larger social structure, in both national and international dimensions). The period was momentous enough: the festering stalemate of Civil Rights struggles both in its achievements and tragedies, such as the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling and the later assassination of many of its members and leaders; the American misadventure in Vietnam; the formation of a socialist state in Cuba, so tantalizingly a mere stone throw away; and the massive wave of political decolonization on the African continent and elsewhere. It was a period of productive flux that appropriately left nothing as sacrosanct from critical inspection. For once, "Power" became prefixed with "Black," both as describing the seized moment and as a galvanizing aspiration. The Black Arts Movement was the cultural arm of the nationalist, political Black Power crusade.

The first anthology of the movement, Black Fire, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal appeared in 1968, containing essays, poetry, fiction and short plays. It was, however, the Drama Review special issue on black theatre of the same year, edited by Ed Bullins, that immediately became the movement's unofficial manifesto. Together with Black Expression (1969) and The Black Aesthetic (1971), both edited by Addison Gayle, these anthologies codify the movement's central concern, the development of an anti-Eurocentric, anti-imperialist discursive practice known as the "black aesthetic."

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, the one in whom the consciousness explosion of the times received its most complex expression articulates the informing canons of black aesthetic:

I would like to . . . say that my conception of art, black art, is that it has to be collective, it has to be functional, it has to be committed and that actually, if it's not stemming from conscious nationalism, then at this time it's invalid. When I say collective, that it comes from the collective experience of black people, when I say committed, it has to be committed to change, revolutionary change. When I say functional, it has to have a function to the lives of black people (cited in Jeyifous 41).

In these terms, the new black theatre literally defined itself away from the mainstream American theatre. "Collective" pushes this theatre from the norm of formalized entertainment symbolized by Broadway to a non-play event characteristic of—so went the interpretation—indigenous African communal rituals and religious occasions. "Committed" underscores consciousness grasped as transitory, continually transforming itself in response—and this is the "functional" part—to the perceived needs, hopes and aspirations of black people. The quest, defined by Baraka, was for a "post-white or post-American form."

Larry Neal, the leading critic of the movement, wrote of the group's proposition of "a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic . . . a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology" that would primarily "speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people" ("The Black" 257) and bring about "the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world" (259) These largely didactic expositions interspersed with only vague and rhetorical intimations of formal specificity later gave way to more sustained explorations of a distinctive difference for the black aesthetic event, building on re-visioned African-American and African expressive forms. In drama, for instance, early ideological vociferations and agit-prop pieces gave way to some form of modified realism and then expansive rituals- the latter the most favored as the truly black and anti-Western aesthetic.

Black Power and its parallel black cultural revolt also swept through the Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The quest for a "black aesthetic" took the form of a quest for a "Caribbean aesthetic." The Caribbean was and is by no means only black; the European and East Indian components are duly recognized, but the reasoning was that a truly anti-imperial Caribbean aesthetics would have to be anchored on the cultural traditions of the majority of the Caribbean population, the blacks. Such was the logic of the most significant writer produced by the times, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, articulated in such writings as "The Love Axe" and the collection, Roots. Considered by many to be the region's second leading poet after Derek Walcott, Brathwaite's poetry gave eloquent voice to the thematic preoccupations of black aesthetic-cultural revolt such as racial inequality, quest for identity, exile, journey, reclamation of Africa, return to roots, and interrogation of history. In form, he appropriated words, concepts, symbols, mythological systems and allusions from Caribbean, African American and African cultures. His The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), best exemplifies his black Caribbean aesthetic practice.

The continental African discourse of "black aesthetics" was no less uneven, though accented differently. It achieved its most activist exploration in South Africa, where the practice of apartheid, or racial segregation, by the minority white population that controlled the government, produced a similar explosive racial animosity as in the United States of America. Perhaps because of the overwhelming frazzling sanctions against the black majority on which the apartheid system rests, the late 1960s South African Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), could not produce or elaborate any large body of aesthetic/cultural theory.

The Black Consciousness Movement, on the belief that the way to liberation from white minority rule lay in a change of consciousness of blacks—a change from their inferiority complex and overly Eurocentric ways and ideas forced on them by various apparatuses of the apartheid regime—embarked on a program of ideological recuperation and re-indoctrination. The goal was "black consciousness," an outlook meant to instill pride and dignity in black self and heritage and catalyze a steadfast resistance to the institutionalized racism of apartheid. Black consciousness is the self-conscious invention and promotion of black culture and art that would aid the "conscientization" and therefore liberation of black people. Steve Biko, the articulate and matyred leader of the movement wrote:

Black culture above all implies freedom on our part to innovate without recourse to white values. This innovation is part of the natural development of any culture. A culture is essentially the society's composite answer to the varied problems of life. We are experiencing new problems every day and whatever we do adds to the richness of our cultural heritage as long as it has man as its centre. The adoption of black theatre and drama is one such important innovation which we need to encourage and to develop. (I Write 96).

Black Consciousness was long on rhetoric and short on practice of black aesthetics. A lot was written by the many drama groups on radical content, but very little that was specific on form, which is where aesthetics and its cultural provenance or ethnicity are determined.

In performance, the groups mix forms at will, combine elements of realism and non-realism, barriers between performers and the audience are observed or ignored as seen fit, fiery, direct polemical speeches are not uncommon, and many groups are well-known for multi-media shows, integrating song, film projection, recitation and chant, sound and "sculptural groupings" (Kavanagh 166).

Elsewhere racially less claustrophobic on the continent, black aesthetics and its sponsoring sentiments were not unknown among Western-trained intellectuals, but had far more erratic sway. This remained so in spite of the institution of many cultural festivals show-casing indigenous African performance forms (the gigantic and wasteful Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC, held in Nigeria in 1977, included), and the many conferences on African writing devoted to exploring "appropriate" and "relevant" aesthetic paradigms for the continent held at various times and in various places. A colloquium on black aesthetics was organized at Makerere University in Uganda in March 1971. It was followed by a similar event in June of the same year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. The papers of the latter occasion were collected in the volume, Black Aesthetics, edited by Andrew Gurr and Pio Zirimu. Although the focus of the colloquium was specific enough, the papers ranged more generally over such wider matters as cultural imperialism, the dual cultural socialization of the ex-colonized world, the role of the writer in society, and the role of literature in liberation struggles, than on the formal properties of a poem or play or fiction that would constitute "black aesthetic."

But there was a preceding effort, and it was richer and more promising. It was not named "black aesthetics" but the sentiments and goal were the same. This was the effort of Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel Laureate in literature. Beginning from the early 1960s, even before the USA Black Arts Movement, Soyinka launched a withering attack at Negritude for what he called its narcissistic cult of the African world ("The Future," "From a Common Back Cloth," "And After the Narcissist?"). Soyinka called instead for greater self-confidence and a "seemingly indifferent acceptance" of the properly apprehended black self; "the duiker will not paint 'duiker' on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude," Soyinka debunked the romanticism of the black self and the African past, "you'll know him by his elegant leap. The less self conscious the African is, and the more innately his individual qualities appear in his writing, the more seriously he will be taken as an artist of exciting dignity" ("The Future," cited in Chinweizu, Toward 201).

The venom notwithstanding, Soyinka's critique was basically one of affirmation. He was himself deeply committed to the defense of African cultures and cultural production against racist dismissals, and specifically to the critical study and appropriation of indigenous aesthetic paradigms in his writings. When obviously prejudiced critics began to use his arguments to condemn any Africa-centered discourses whether in aesthetics, philosophy or history, Soyinka had to clarify his reading of Negritude, emphasizing similarity of goals but a great divergence of means. "Our opposition to negritude," he said, is "based on self-acceptance," "a hard-eyed self-examination, not self-denial" ("The African World" 36). He identified the vision of Negritude as the "restitution and re-engineering of a racial psyche, the establishment of a distinct human entity and the glorification of its long-suppressed attributes," and warned that this vision "should never be underestimated or belittled" (Myth 126). The disagreeable point, however, was that Negritude adopted an overly simplified route toward realizing its goal:

Its re-entrenchment of black values was not preceded by any profound effort to enter into this African system of values. It extolled the apparent. Its reference points took far too much colouring from European ideas even while its Messiahs pronounced themselves fanatically African. In attempting to refute the evaluation to which black reality had been subjected, Negritude adopted the Manichean tradition of European thought and inflicted it on a culture which is most radically anti-Manichean (Myth 127).

The obverse of Soyinka's criticisms indicate his own strategies for artistically registering the "African worldview," his favorite phrase; and in works such as the essay, "The Fourth Stage" (Myth 140-60), a theory of Yoruba tragedy, and plays such as The Road, Dance of the Forests and Death of the King's Horseman, he produced the most profound and persuasive "black aesthetic" on the African continent.

In defense of Negritude and in the name of a "traditional" and "native" African aesthetic, the admittedly loud trio, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ikechukwu Madubuike, attacked Soyinka as "euromodernist" and un-African. They gave as reasons Soyinka's difficult poetic articulations and unfamiliar allusions, and when they justified their charges by arguing that poetic complexity is European and simplicity African, "explicitness is a hallmark of African poetry" while "obscurity . . . is a badge of Western modernism" (Chinweizu, "Prodigals" 10), we witnessed the last gasps of a degenerated vision.

At a summative level, "black aesthetics" in its various manifestations was the emblem of black cultural renaissance at a period when politics qua politics was really the driving objective: struggle for black participation in the political process or against neocolonialism. This explains the varying degrees of aggressivity of the discourse. Afrocentrism, on the other hand, is a cultural child of quieter times, a period when politics or militant protests seem dated or unattractive and cultural qua cultural struggle seems the most effective. It is for this reason that far more than black aesthetics, the turf of Afrocentrism is primarily ideological: a struggle to change dominant negative public consciousness about the black world. This is why the core theme in all Afrocentric exertions is education, conceived both as means and as goal.

It becomes clear then why Afrocentrists have claimed The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), the famous book published by Carter G. Woodson, the distinguished African American historian, as one of its foundational texts. Woodson's critique of the education of the African American up to the time he was writing as "mis-education" or education for servitude—because it denigrated the black while glorifying the white—applied to the colonies as well. That Western education universally functioned, in the historical Africa-Europe encounter, as part of an apparatus of domination is obvious enough. Woodson specified the process involved as subjectification that produced in the African American not simply a racialized consciousness (this is the lot of whites too) but also a slavish or servile one. Woodson's elaboration is classic and prescient in its subtlety for insisting that while the situation was ideal for no one white or black, it nevertheless benefitted the white more than the black:

The so-called modern education, with all its defects . . . does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. . . . [T]aught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary (xii, xiii, 192).

This was also the argument of W. E. B. Du Bois about thirty years earlier, that the African American was smitten with a peculiarly unhealing lesion by "a world which yields him no true self consciousness" but a "double consciousness," a sense of "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (Souls 18). The controlled mind Woodson describes is what Du Bois means by seeing "one's self through the eyes of others." It is Afrocentrism's declared goal to break the vicious cycle of the (re)reproduction of black self-abnegation or inferiority complex.

Afrocentrism sets about its daunting task by adopting two approaches, often deployed simultaneously: deconstructive and reconstructive. A rebuttal of the whole archive of European ideological racism, and an often bold and passionate restitutive act of inscribing authentic (because self-constructed and not blatantly imposed) African—most often meaning black—subjectivity. Without this framework, it would be difficult to fully appreciate the significance of some texts that have become favorites with Afrocentrists such as The Stolen Legacy (1954) by George G. M. James, They Came Before Columbus (1976) by Ivan Van Sertima, Black Folk Here and There 1991) by St. Clair Drake, The Destruction of Black Civilization (1974) by Chancellor Williams, The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974) by Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) by Martin Bernal, and Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, by Marimba Ani. Ani's 672-page book was first published in January 1994; by July of the same year, it had gone into its fourth printing.

Afrocentrism is a movement for the reformation of the consciousness of both blacks and whites—but particularly of blacks—perceived to be hamstrung by centuries of racist European thinking, teaching, and general ideas. It is an "escape to sanity," as Molefi K. Asante, professor and one-time chair of African American Studies at Temple University, and the chief popularizer of Afrocentrism within the American academy, puts it (Afrocentric Idea 125). It flaunts its genealogy in the great African empires and kingdoms, the many slave revolts, Pan-Africanism, Negritude, independence of African countries from colonial rule, and the Black Power/black aesthetics movement. So if it seems that we have heard or read about similar "afrocentric" endeavors or pronouncements in the past, it is probably very true.

Afrocentrism is fast becoming institutionalized in the United States, the center of its storm. The recent spate of academic codifications of the phenomenon, journalistic accounts of its "street" manifestations, reactions to it from diverse institutions (e.g. Euro-American and African-American newsmagazines) and perspectives, say as much. It is tempting to think Afrocentrism, as many emergency experts in the press have done, under the general umbrella of fad and consumerism and the increasing purchasing power of blacks. After all, the most popular and visible modes of dissemination of Afrocentrism are items of consumption: clothing, hairstyle, paintings, sculptures, children's toys, books. But there is something else more profound than this. Afrocentrism has received and is receiving considerable boost from the cultural shift known as postmodernism and its privileging of difference, micro-struggles, and the politics of identity. Postmodernism's general assault on the authority and universalist claims of Western "culture" is also the mainstay of any Afrocentric agenda. The cultural shift has also rejuvenated black studies which, in turn, is providing Afrocentrism much-needed intellectual and institutional anchor in the academy.

Afrocentrism is often chided for its overwhelming focus onreformation of consciousness and racial pride. "Contribute to solving the problem of black male unemployment by gainfully employing all black males over the age of 18, and the positive psychological intent of Afrocentricity will be accomplished" (Hazzard-Gordon 21), so goes a sample of the argument. Indeed, there is much appearance of truth in this reproach, after all, what seem to be the most pressing problems of blacks—both in Africa and the diaspora—in relation to whites, are economic exploitation and political domination, rather than psychological subjection. And fervid Afrocentrism neither directly leads to more and better-paying jobs for blacks nor to an arrest of the increasing fourth-worldization of both African countries and black communities in Europe and America.

In spite of these, the reproach nonetheless misses the mark and confuses issues, after all, the most vociferous and committed proponents of Afrocentrism are employed middle-class blacks, from university professors to company executives, lawyers, journalists, doctors, millionaire entrepreneurs (rappers, actors and actresses, and more)—those with the requisite purchasing power to sustain numerous Afrocentric cottage industries producing books, cards, posters, t-shirts, and transcontinental art dealerships and vacation cruises; and also with adequate intellectual resources to persuade school districts across the United States to diversify their curricula. But there is an even more important reason why the reproach is off course: an inability to properly specify the character of Afrocentrism as a mode of struggle: it is a struggle over consciousness or subjectification. It is linked to the economic and the political but is not reducible to either.

Many "theories" have been put forward to understand Afrocentrism, the most common being that it is no more than Eurocentrism in black clothing. This is a profound truth as well as a profound lie. First, the truth. There could be no Afrocentrism without Eurocentrism. They are both locked in an intricate specular embrace in which difference resides more in the "visible" paraphernalia than in the "invisible" supporting structures. Thus for every Roman aqueduct and Gothic cathedral, there must be found parallel African "feats." Which explains the undue fixation with the Africanization of Egypt of antiquity, with its pyramids and sphinxes. No, it is not shunning the execrable monumentalization of history that is important but merely adding one's own monuments; it is not how history is represented that matters but simply a question of additional representations. Whatever happened to Fanon's stirring appeal against such "nauseating mimicry" (Wretched 311, 311-16)?

Asante is always quick to (a) deny borrowing structures from Eurocentrism and (b) delink Afrocentrism from "race," emphasizing that whatever link exists is only coincidental. As palpable evidence, he is eager to run off a list of those he considers as black Eurocentrics but he has never been as equally eager to admit of the possibility of white Afrocentrics. Leonard Jeffries's spurious theory of white people as "ice people" and black people as "sun people" (Boyd 37) nauseates us even as it also reminds us that, in the historiography of the racialization of thought and culture, he stands in the good company of European greats such as Hegel, Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Mill, and their shadows in many current permutations such as christians/heathens, civilized/barbaric, ethnic/tribe, and so on. He is merely reading these figures "upside down."

Jean-Paul Sartre was very correct then in his famous censure against the afrocentrism of Negritude—that it is an anti-racist racism. It is "the weak stage in a dialectical progression," he says, an antithetical low ebb in which "the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is its thesis" (15, 60). Without Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism is devoid of many basic epistemological premises.

But Afrocentrism is not simply black-faced Eurocentrism. As a counter-discourse, it dares Eurocentrism to glimpse a space it (Eurocentrism) is structurally incapable of contemplating. The latter's claims to seamlessly account for all experience is embarrassed by a force and passion that is thoroughly disconcerting. When Asante declares that "[t]he question 'Do you like classical music?' usually elicits this response from me: 'Whose classical?'" ("Molefi Kete Asante" 21), he sends unsettling tremors to the foundations of an old and authoritative discourse of Western cultural supremacy. Why should the African-American remain in subjection and still count time as B.C. and A.D., Asante queries in a different context. For the genuinely Afrocentric in America, the time-mark is 1619, the year of African arrival in America for the "beginning again." Thus 1601 is none other than 18 B.B.A. (Before the Beginning Again) and 1999 400 A.B.A. (After the Beginning Again) (Afrocentricity 24). I think we are right to snigger at these apparently futile twitches, though we must not forget that our sniggers are less about the twitches than a complicit homage and fatalistic surrender to the continuing force and power of Eurocentrism. This subversive thrust authorizes dreams beyond existing boundaries and is thus a propeller of the dynamism of history (Olaniyan).

Afrocentrism thus goes beyond Eurocentrism. This explains the insight of Fanon in his simultaneous justification and condemnation of Negritude: that it is important for the psycho-affective equilibrium of the black but that it is also a potentially straight road to a blind alley (Wretched 206-248). Sartre then is very wrong: his stricture against Negritude, a parochial and vulgar marxist exegesis (an approach which, to be fair to him, he moved away from in some of his later works), lacks the subtlety and productive ambiguity found in Fanon and which also underpin Achebe's own riposte in the epigraph above that an anti-racist racism is in the absence of everything else a good antidote to white racism.

The deconstructive logic I have outlined is not limited to Eurocentrism-Afrocentrism transactions alone but a structural feature of dominant-subordinate relations. Witness, for instance, the systematic and thoughtful unscrambling Afrocentrism—dominant in black discursive sphere, male-dominated and homophobic—is currently receiving from the discourse of many black feminist writers and scholars (Henderson, Wallace, McDowell, Gates).

It is in the nature of counter-discourses like black aesthetics and Afrocentrism to be a qualitative advance over the dominant, no matter how slight or easily (re)incorporated into the dominant—the need for (re)incorporation is evidence of the advance I am talking about. The "advance" is the quintessentially relativist character of counter-discourses. The proponents of "black aesthetics" only wanted that, and never suggested that other peoples of the world must have it. Asante's rallying cry, "Pluralism without hierarchy," is fundamentally anti-imperialist. Were this to be the European motto in the 18th and 19th centuries, there would have been no Empire. Most anti-Eurocentric Afrocentric discourses rarely propose their own superiority and conversely, European inferiority. When they do, they become utterly ludicrous, like many utterances of Leonard Jeffries or of the Nation of Islam.

But the relativism of black aesthetics and Afrocentrism, like of all counter-discourses, is not due to any altruism but to their structural location as subordinate(d) discourses. To adapt a popular saying, relativism is the weapon of the weak. In fact, the dream of counter-discourses is very often to take over the master's house, not to dismantle it. Witness the result of political nationalism in most erstwhile colonized countries, or the Afrocentric fixation with "centering" Africa (Asante, "Putting Africa at the Center") rather than querying the construct of "center" and "margin"—someone, after all, would have to be pushed to the margin once one accepts the idea of a center.

As Afrocentrism continues to catalyze debates and inspire new social forms, the challenge is at least to guard against the degeneration of relativism and so prevent ghettoization, and at most to re-vision and theorize relativism itself as a mode of intercultural transactions. Toward both objectives, I propose Fanon as one of our ground-clearers and guides—and we might just as well start with the following delicious formulation:

To us, the man who adores the Negro [undue narcissism by the black, paternalist/maternalist benevolence by the white] is as "sick" as the man who abominates him [self-hatred by the black, virulent racism by the white] (Black Skins 8).

Such a visionary rethinking is particularly necessary given the still shaky foothold in the American academy of that most enduring legacy of black aesthetics and Afrocentrism: the institutionalization of Black Studies as a valid area of study. Part of doing the rethinking is to cut through the tangled controversy of Black Studies and disciplinary organization of knowledge production.

Well into the third decade after its emergence, a consensus is still far from the horizon about the institutional topography and professional and methodological features of Black Studies. Two elements remain constant in the many definitions of this area of inquiry: the black world in general and black America in particular as the focus, and a perspective that is, in the final analysis, partisan toward the aspirations of blacks. The latter, that is, the question of orientation or perspective, is usually considered more important, since there could be a focus on the black world that is unquestionably inimical to black interests. It is in fact this kind of deleterious focus—either by negative representation or non-representation—by the West and its intellectual traditions, that Black Studies was designed to redress. And here I direct readers to the useful volume edited by Armstead Robinson, Black Studies in the University (1969), which could very well pass as an account of the origin of Black Studies at Yale University.

The great debate today is less about definition and more about the ultimate institutional form Black Studies would take. The two contending models are Black Studies as a program, and as a department. Activist Afrocentrists generally argue in favor of a department. A program depends on the traditional disciplines as resource base, that is, for faculty and courses. A department, on the other hand, aims to be autonomous and self-contained. I believe it says a lot about the nature of Black Studies that this debate is absolutely unintelligible outside the parameters of unequal race relations in America. In other words, while the connections between the conditions and practices of knowledge production and social power may be hidden or subtle in the traditional disciplines, they are generally open in the case of Black Studies.

The advantages of a program are many. Because it entails what is considered as a more optimum use of resources, i.e. professors in the different disciplines working on the black world are also Black Studies professors, it is relatively more easily funded by university administrations. There is also a far wider faculty expertise and course offerings than a department could ever dream of, since a university with specialists in black history in the History department is not likely to be enthusiastic in hiring similar specialists for a Black Studies department. And as a shield against the vagaries of the job market or graduate school admissions, the program also grounds the student in one or more of the traditional disciplines.

For the Afrocentrists however, the program remains a revolution aborted, a half-way house, a pitiful compromise that is still miles away from the autonomy in the production of knowledge about the black world that the 1960s struggles aimed for. The ideological argument is that the program, locked in so tight an embrace with the existing disciplines, can only sponsor "studies about blacks," not "black studies"—the result of which can only be a bland, diffused knowledge which, though about blacks, is lacking in any unified and unifying passion, much less the required one for the advancement of blacks. The program is seen, furthermore, as too dependent on the goodwill of—largely white and male—administrators and departmental chairs, a goodwill that cannot always be taken for granted, a goodwill offered ever so miserly and condescendingly. And if a program is easier to fund, it is also easier to scrap in times of financial crises, the critics say, insisting that the proper recognition and institutional rootedness and stability of Black Studies depend on its being accorded a departmental status.

The arguments against the program are the arguments for the department: a department confers status, is autonomous, and rooted beyond administrative caprice. Proponents rarely examine though, how a departmental status necessarily guarantees autonomy—and to what extent—from unsympathetic administrators. Or how a department will necessarily secure a unified and unifying ideological perspective. The risk of ghettoization is rarely seriously addressed, because this could be very subjective: one's ghetto is another's autonomous space. When addressed at all, it becomes another instance of the ubiquitous but often true "bad faith" of the administrators. This often turns out like a clash between an immovable object and an irresistible force, since, as I have argued, very few administrations are willing to hire a black literature faculty for an English department and another one for a Black Studies department in the same university. This is why many of the existing Black Studies departments today have to operate on a faculty "joint-appointment" basis with other departments—which opponents insist is still far from the desired autonomy.

The underlying epistemological and philosophical question of this debate is whether Black Studies is a discipline which, like history, biology, or economics, is a distinct branch of learning with its own distinctive disciplinary rituals, practices and end-product, knowledge; or a thematic focus that cuts across the disciplines, i.e. multidisciplinary or, as it is commonly described, "interdisciplinary." The implications of this question for the institutional structure of Black Studies are clear enough: to say that Black Studies is a discipline is to say it ought to be a department—by the logic of the existing congruence of disciplinary identity with departmental status, while Black Studies as thematic focus nearly automatically implies the program.

But Black Studies is really not like physics, biology or political science. And the proponents of Black Studies as a discipline—hardcore Afrocentrists all—know this very well, which is why they have been the most vociferous and defensive about their stand. Let us quickly look at the solutions to this dilemma proposed by two of the most visible advocates of Black Studies as a discipline. Maulana Karenga, in his Introduction to Black Studies published in 1982, accepts the "interdisciplinary" character of Black Studies but argues that it is a "discipline" nonetheless, an "interdisciplinary discipline." He writes:

Black Studies . . . as an interdisciplinary discipline has seven basic subject areas. These interdisciplinary foci which at first seem to be disciplines themselves are, in fact, separate disciplines when they are outside the discipline of Black Studies, but inside, they become and are essentially subject areas which contribute to a wholistic picture and approach to the Black experience. Moreover, the qualifier Black, attached to each area in an explicit or implicit way, suggests a more specialized and delimited focus which of necessity transforms a broad discipline into a particular subjected area. The seven basic subject areas of Black Studies then are: Black History; Black Religion; Black Social Organization; Black Politics; Black Economics; Black Creative Production (Black Art, Music, and Literature); and Black Psychology" (35-6).

It is not clear in Karenga's book how such an appropriation of the existing disciplines will magically transform them into a Black Studies discipline with distinctive disciplinary practices and end-product.

Molefi Asante tries to avoid Karenga's circumlocution while at the same time affirming its premise. Black Studies, he says, is "Africalogy," a discipline devoted to "the Afrocentric study of African concepts, issues and behaviors" (1987: 16). Shoring up Karenga, he writes: "Africalogy is a separate and distinct field of study from the composite sum of its initial founding disciplines" (1990: 141). And in the essay, "Afrocentric Metatheory and its Disciplinary Implications," his contribution to the inaugural issue of The Afrocentric Scholar: The Journal of the National Council for Black Studies, Asante "clarifies" that "African American Studies is a discrete discipline with certain critical perspectives, theories, and methods which are necessary for its role in discovery and understanding" (104). "In Africology" [sic], I quote, "language, myth, ancestral memory, dance-music-art, and science provide the sources of knowledge, the canons of proof, and the structure of truth" (108). Methodologically, "[t]he groundedness of observations and behavior in the historical experiences of Africans becomes the main base for operation in the field of African American Studies.... As a discipline, Africology is sustained by a commitment to centering the study of African phenomena, events, and persons in the cultural voice of the composite African people" (110). Perhaps, what we have here is really not an avoidance of circumlocution but a substitution of one for the other. For the question we posed to Karenga is still unanswered: what transforms the traditional disciplines to "Afric(a/o)logy" once they enter Black Studies? Asante says that "[t]he fundamental basis for Africology as a separate discipline is a unique perspective" (1992: 105). But a perspective is not a discipline, otherwise there would have been Marxist, Republican, Liberal, Democratic, Poststructuralist, etc departments.

I have argued that this debate in unintelligible outside the realm of unequal race relations. Let me now clarify what I mean. The genealogy of Black Studies in agonistic racial struggles is unhidden, as we all know, so it calls for no deconstruction. Exclusion calls for struggles for representation. The current debate receives its constant supply of catalyst from the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tension between what I call corporeal representation and discursive or ideological representation. Corporeal representation means tangible, outward, bodily representation, while discursive or ideological representation refers to representation according to perspective or orientation. The dream of Black Studies, whether as discipline or program or any other institutional manifestation, and whether so clearly expressed or not, is that there be a convergence between corporeal and desired ideological representation, i.e. black professors teaching black or other materials from a black point of view—the point of view that advances the interests of blacks. This is also the dream of Women's Studies, in which we probably can find parallels to the Black Studies debate.

Theoretically, the convergence is neither necessary before black or women's interests are advanced, nor a guarantee that such interests will be advanced. And so, the most important of the two is ideological representation. Historically—which is also saying practically—however, significant corporeal representation usually precedes, and is most often a precondition for effective ideological representation. In other words, Black or Women's Studies (and the decent work being done in their names) emerged only when the population of these groups in the academy increased significantly. To be for Black Studies as a discipline is therefore to privilege corporeal representation. This is why Asante could argue that "[a]ssaults on Africology as a discipline...are nothing more than attacks on the idea that African Americans can neither create theories nor disciplines, and is ultimately the same tune played in previous discussions of African intelligence" (1992: 104). This is also the reason for his insistence on the political character of Black Studies: "Africology becomes a discipline whose mission is, inter alia, the critique of domination" (1992: 105). And again: "One cannot speak of Africology apart from its origin in the drive to humanize education, democratize the curriculum, to advance the understanding of humanity. This is the birthright of the discipline more than any other discipline in the social sciences or the humanities" (1992: 108). But as I have argued, political character or orientation does not a "discipline" make. Perhaps what Asante and Karenga should have done is critique the very notion of "discipline," probably as "eurocentric" and limiting, and ask for a reconstitution of knowledge according to a different category or paradigm. But they have been unwilling to do this, since to give up the notion of a discipline is also to give up the idea of a department that comes with it—and hence to give up the struggles for Black Studies as a department. Though we all agree that corporeal representation does not necessarily mean positive discursive representation—The ultra-conservative United States Supreme Court Judge, Clarence Thomas, is popularly perceived to be a classic example of this truism—the argument for corporeal representation will continue to be strident and last as long as our unequal race relations.

The goal of any branch of inquiry is, of course, the production of knowledge. And inevitably inscribed on a body of knowledge are traces of its context of production. I will say right away that the kind of knowledge I think Black Studies should produce is neither "disciplinary" nor "interdisciplinary" but "extra-disciplinary": a knowledge that is beyond and not necessarily bound by the disciplines, a trans-disciplinary knowledge that make for simultaneous disciplinary identification and disidentification. I mean the best of the kind of knowledge that feminism and cultural studies have produced and are capable of producing. In what institutional context such a type of knowledge will be produced is more a political than an epistemological question—which is not to say that the one is superior or inferior to the other.

The decade of the 1990s has been particularly auspicious for Afrocentrism as a discursive practice, what with the rise of multiculturalism and many high profile black scholars and writers (many of whom are not necessarily declared "Afrocentrists") and the increased positive visibility of black studies as a valid area of intellectual inquiry. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the most interesting developments that will usher Afrocentrism into the next millennium is a battle over its heart and soul, for its radical redefinition. Although "Afrocentrism" still conjures in the minds of many (suspicions of) lax scholarship characterized by essentialist transhistorical claims, univocal or unanimist philosophical postulates, and generally a passion more militant and political than intellectual, the quiet reality of the late 1990s is that that popular image is being powerfully challenged by theoretically sophisticated scholars no less concerned about Africa but much more subtle in their articulation of the place of African diaspora in the world. That challenge has become so influential that it is really no longer accurate to speak of Afrocentrism but Afrocentrisms. Thus, I identify two formations of Afrocentrism, more or less crystallized; I have borrowed from the discourse of religion to label the two as sacred, and secular.

Sacred Afrocentrism cultivates a cult of blackness which, to say the truth, is tailored after the dominant cult of whiteness. It assumes a filiative relationship among black societies cross-culturally, and obsession with corporeality rules its politics of representation. Secular Afrocentrism, on the other hand, begins from a rejection of both the cult of blackness and of whiteness, emphasizing instead the risky option of critical engagement with all as the true challenge of multicultural democracy. Its conception of Pan-African relations is affiliative and based on constructed interests rather than simply skin color. Hence, its politics of representation is predominantly discursive. Where sacred Afrocentrism is nationalist or ethnicist, secular Afrocentrism is transnational or cosmopolitan. Where sacred Afrocentrism still has its theoretical and conceptual moorings firmly in modernism with its fixation with binarisms, secular Afrocentrism is postmodernist in orientation. Sacred Afrocentrism's attitude to history is as a painful wound to reopen repeatedly, because that is where the moral depravity at the origin of contemporary Western civilization is at its most garish. Secular Afrocentrism, on the other hand, acknowledges this history and uses it as a springboard for a simultaneously particular (black) and universal (general human) campaign for a world without a repeat of such historical oppressions. In other words, the attitude of sacred Afrocentrism to historical Africa-Europe encounter is only critical (that is, used as criticism against the West), while that of secular Afrocentrism is critical and restorative. Molefi Asante, about whom enough has been said above, is the leading figure of a sacred Afrocentrism.

The leading proponent of a secular Afrocentrism is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor and chair of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. His interventions in the Afrocentrism debate can be plotted in two directions: a discursive detaching of skin color or ethnicity from Afrocentrism, and the building of institutional resources for the study of the African diaspora. Against the proprietary attitude of the sacred Afrocentrists, Gates argues that "all scholars of Africa and its diaspora are, by definition 'Afrocentric,' if the term signifies the recognition that Africa is centrally in the world, as much as the world is in Africa" ("Beware" 47). Rather than "ethnic fundamentalism" and "ideological conformity" in black studies, he calls for "a true proliferation of rigorous methodologies," the precondition for a productive and "free inquiry into the very complexity of being of African descent in the world":

We need to explore the hyphen in African-American, on both sides of the Atlantic. We must chart the porous relations between an "American" culture that officially pretends that an Anglo-American regional culture is the tru, universal culture, and the black cultures it so long stigmatized. We must also document the continuities and discontinuities between African and African American cultures, rather than reduce the astonishing diversity of African cultures to a few simple-minded shibboleths ("Beware 47).

Gates's attempt is to authorize an Afrocentrism much more refined and sophisticated than the dominant stereotypical image of that formation, and therefore make it easy to enlarge the circle of adherents to those who would like to claim Afrocentrism but were wary of the negative label. The political subtlety has won the accolades of the white media, as press houses fall over themselves to run features on Gates. Sartorial proclivities may not say much, but it is extremely interesting that the public image of Asante, nearly always in a capacious resplendent Yoruba agbada, contrasts so sharply with Gates's ever "clean-cut" suit. In the very real American market-place of images and meanings, Gates is the far less threatening (Asante evokes too much the dansiki-wearing black radicalism of the 1960s!) and wins the familiarity contest hands down. Plus, Gates is one of the heavyweight professors at Harvard, the premier American university, and Asante is not, and this point, crude as it is, is not an insignificant one in a status-crazy America. If the messenger is so palatable, is it ever possible that the message will not? No, and the connection between this point and Gates's unparalleled achievements in building resources for the study of Africa and its diaspora is incalculable.

Gates's assiduous detective work led to the discovery and reprinting of the first novel by a black woman, Our Nig; Or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black (1859; 1983), by Harriet E. Wilson. This was only the beginning of major tradition-defining publishing events he nurtured and edited. The thirty-volume The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, which made available for the first time in easily accessible form the entire range of writings by black women between 1773 and 1910, was published by Oxford University Press in 1988. The crowning jewel, because of the prestige of W.W. Norton in academic textbook publishing and its implicit connection with canonization, is The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published to widespread acclaim in 1997. With former fellow Harvard University professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gates put together and edited the first multimedia encyclopedia of the black world on CD-ROM, Encarta Africana, published by Microsoft Corporation in 1999, which is fast finding its way into school classrooms across the country.

Gates and Appiah also founded the popular website, Africana.com, which later morphed into blackvoices.aol.com. It is devoted to increasing understanding of, and appreciation for, black history and culture, and publicizing black issues globally. In addition to daily news articles about African and African American people and events, the site also has links to educational resources for learning about the history and cultures of Africa and its diaspora; and web access to many black radio Stations around the world.

Then there are the popular video series by Gates on the black world in general and African America in particular in the last several years. These include the The Two Nations of Black America in 1998, the much-discussed and controversial six-part Wonders of the African World series in 1999, the four-part America Beyond the Color Line in 2004, and the recent four-part African American Lives (2006).

This then is the face of a new secular Afrocentrism which is most likely to become dominant for decades to come. Unlike sacred Afrocentrism, it does not concede a "mainstream" white space that is unreachable for blacks or irredeemably racist. On the contrary, it masters the language of that mainstream, actively claims its belongingness there, and aims to force it—the mainstream—to see itself in and the world in different ways, ways that promise to liberate, psychologically at least, both the black and the white in the discursive practice of race.

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Citation Format:

Tejumola Olaniyan. “From Black Aesthetics to Afrocentrism (Or, A Small History of an African and African American Discursive Practice),” West Africa Review: Issue 9, 2006.

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