AFRACENTRISM AS THEORY: THE DISCOURSE OF DIASPORA LITERATURE

Gay Wilentz East Carolina University

In the examination of African literature as a comparative literature, the study of literature from Africa and its diaspora presents itself as an inte- gral part of this process. In regard to that study, one of its major expres- sive theories is of relevance—Afrocentrism. As both a literary theory and as cultural theory, Afrocentrism (and its antecedent, Pan Africanism) has been hotly debated. Although debate of this kind can be the excit- ing material for scholarly and community discourse, the debate over Afrocentrism has become so distorted in the U.S. popular media, that the validity of this approach has often been lost to the binary opposi- tions so prevalent in Western thought. In this essay, I (re)examine the concepts of Afrocentrism as Afr acentrism in relation to the works of women writers from West Africa and the African Diaspora, particularly the US and the Anglophone Caribbean. I aim to present, as Frederic Jameson suggests for all good criticism, “a laying bare, a restoration of the original message, the original experience beneath the distortions of the various kinds of censorship that have been at work upon it” (404). To do this, I interrogate the debate, inscribed in mostly masculinist terms, explore the relationship of (Black) feminist theory to Afrocentrism, and examine four writers—Flora Nwapa (Nigerian), Erna Brodber (Jamaican), Paule Marshall (Barbadian-American), and Toni Cade Bambara (African American)1—to return the critical discussion back to the texts. To begin to “lay bare” the discussion of Afrocentrism and its devel- opment as a theory, it may be useful to de Ž ne this term at its base. One of the earliest use of this expressive theory on the African conti- nent comes from the germinal study, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1983). Developing a literary approach from the theoretical constructs of Pan-Africanism, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Maduibuike identify, through Afrocentrism, the connections among those of African descent and particularly the literary “achieve- ments of the African peoples in the homeland and in the diaspora” (3). DeŽ ned here mainly as a literary and cultural theory, these authors per- ceive an Afrocentric approach to literature as a way of non-parochial

Passages 2,1 38 afrAcentrism as theory reading, resisting earlier critics who found African literature as some- how faulty when judged by what they call “ Eurocentric” aesthetics: “[These critics] view Arican literature as a overseas department of European literatures, as a literatures with no traditions of its own to build upon” (3). In Toward the Decolonization , the authors develop of the- ory of literature from Africa and the diaspora, which, according to them, decolonizes and liberates the works. Chinweizu et al. focus their argument for the most part on the African continent, and limit themselves to a discussion of literature, albeit inclu- sive of artistic utterances not always identi Ž ed as part of literary study. In the United States, however, Mole Ž Ketu Asante, in a separate en- deavor, utilizes the term as a comprehensive critical perspective for African American life. According to Asante, Afrocentricity “means, liter- ally, placing African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior” (6). He states further in this work and others that Afrocentricity pervades every aspect of African American culture. Questions arise from Asante’s totalizing perspective that have fueled resistance to this theoretical position. I choose not to examine the distorted attack on Afrocentrism in the media (which would be an intriguing article in itself ); 2 rather, I touch on some of the scholarly con- cerns and then recon Ž gure them within the constructs of a feminist/ Afracentrist position. One major argument with the Afrocentric position, broadly con- scribed, focuses on the Afrocentric notion of the African continent (even Sub-Saharan Africa) as a cohesive whole with its own norms, values, and traditions. According to V. I. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa , the period of colonization, however brief, signi Ž ed “radically new types of discourse on African traditions and cultures” (1). One aspect of the discourse was a totalizing view of the continent “invented” by the col- onizers. In the more recent In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Cuture, Kwame Anthony Appiah examines the history of Pan-Africanism anddetails the basic racialism of this movement, especially in regard to early theoristsAlexander Crummell and W. E. B. Dubois. He comments:

[T]he very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racial- ism; the notion of Pan-African was founded on the notion of the African, which was, in turn, founded not on any genuine cultural commonality but, as we have seen, on the very European concept of the Negro. (62).

Appiah further critiques Chinweizu et al. (as well as Nobel Prize win- ner Wole Soyinka) for presenting a nativist “reverse discourse” which