Preface 1 Afro- Eccentricity: an Introduction

Notes Preface 1. Nancy Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170. 2. Though I clearly have Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse in mind, I do not commit myself to all of the implications of his theory. 3. Jonathan Z. Smith remarks, “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” See Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. I agree with everything he says except for the hyperbole of “solely.” 4 . See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–1974): 5–20. 1 Afro- Eccentricity: An Introduction 1. See William David Hart, Black Religion: Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and Jan Willis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), x. 2. Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 11. 3. Anderson, 13. 4. Anderson, 13–14. 5. Anderson, 16–17. 6. Anderson, 131–32, 142–43. 7. See S. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in “Black Film, British Cinema,” ed. Kobena Mercer, ICA Documents 7 (1988): 27–31. 8. David Morley and Kuan- Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 443. 9. Morley and Chen, 444. 10. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99. 210 Notes 11. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 224. 12. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 3, no. 6 (December 1986): 519. 13. Collins, 520. 14. Collins, 521. 15. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: HarperCollinsAcademic, 1990), 225, 227. 16. Collins, Black Feminist, 230. 17. Nick Merriman and Tim Schadla- Hall, eds., Public Archaeology (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 153. 18. William D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66. 19. Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 51. 20. Ato Sekyi- Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 34. 21. See Lewis Gordon’s “Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley- Whiting, and Renée T. White, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 297- 308. 22. Sekyi- Otu, 214. 23. This is a reference to a line in Robert Hayden’s great poem “Runagate Runagate.” See Robert Hayden: Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985), 59. 24. These citations come from an unpublished talk, “Translating the Old Greek Bible (The Septuagint): An Inconvenient Witness to Biblical History,” that Melvin Peters, professor of religion at Duke University, delivered as a Kennedy Center lecture, at Brigham Young University, on April 2 in 2009. 25. James Francis Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 27–28. 26. See volume I of Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Claus Wittich and Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), where he analyzes the sociology of religion. 27. I refer to chapter 3 of Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 28. Walzer, 70–71. 29. Walzer, 71. 30. Walzer, 75. 31. Walzer, 89. 32. Walzer, 89–90, 93. 33. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 21. 34. Chireau, 74. 35. Chireau, 103. 36. Chireau, 15–17. Notes 211 37. I presented a highly condensed version of these narratives in the introduction to Black Religion (2008). 2 Three Narratives of Black Religion 1. Omni- American is Albert Murray’s term. According to Murray, “for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so- called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society” (Murray 1970, 22). 2. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 3. This argument is indebted to Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4. Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 5–6. 5. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 123–29. 6. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31, 50. 7. DuBois, 16, 162–63. 8. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East,’ (London: Routledge, 1999), 35–38. 9. DuBois, 160. 10. Howard Thurman, Deep River (Mills College, CA: The Eucalyptus Press, 1945), 2–5. 11. Thurman, 19, 23, 27, 32. 12. James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1991), 29. 13. Cone, 100, 110. 14. Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 278. 15. Mays and Nicholson, 279–92. 16. Ruby Funchess Johnston, The Development of Negro Religion (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1954), xvii. 17. E. Franklin Frazier and C. Eric Lincoln, The Negro Church in America/The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 1974), 86–90. 18. Frazier and Lincoln, 1974, 70–71. 19. Ida Rousseau Mukenge, The Black Church in Urban America: A Case Study in Political Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983), 10. 20. Mukenge, 51–65. 21. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 22. Lincoln and Mamiya, 10–11. 212 Notes 23. Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 6. 24. Asante, 71, 74. 25. Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988), 77. 26. Asante, 1987, 183–95. 27. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York: Verso, 1998); Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Walker, 2001. 28. Walker, 4. Walker’s rhetoric is hyperbolic. For a more nuanced treatment of Afrocentrism, see Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia. Moses rejects, prolepti- cally, Walker’s claim that Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism are equivalent. Walker focuses single-mindedly on the “totalitarian” and quietist dangers that Afrocentrism poses to the political agency and independent judgment of black people. Moses’ focus is dual. In addition to the dangers that Walker describes, he is also concerned by the dangers of dismissive critique, exem- plified by Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa that wittingly or not reproduces racialized, Eurocentric narratives. Her view excludes the Glenn Lourys of the world who regard themselves as descendants of the Greeks. According to Moses: “Lefkowitz’s book has served only to obscure definitions further; it is ahistorical, presentist, synchronic, and absolutely devoid of any of the methods of serious cultural or intellectual history. Like most polemicists, its author finds methodology inconvenient and precise definitions intolerable. Thus she is hardly different from the various demagogues and polemicists who have gathered on the other side of the Afrocentrism debate. Much silli- ness and ill will has been spewed forth by the likes of Mary Lefkowitz and the black nationalist polemicist Maulana Karenga, who represent two sides of the same hateful coin. As a result, it has become almost impossible for most persons to engage in analytical, dispassionate discussion of the various expressions of those movements—both intellectual and emotional—that constitute what we today refer to as ‘Afrocentrism.’ ” If this were not bad enough: “Lefkowitz frequently makes statements that would be challenged by any shrewd undergraduate. For example, speaking of George James, she asserts that ‘many otherwise well- educated people believe that what he claims is true.’ Who are these ‘otherwise well- educated people’ to whom she refers? She does not identify them nor does she provide any data as to their numbers.” “She has thoughtlessly muddled ideas derived from nineteenth- century ethnography, popular mythology of the 1920s, and cult literature of the 1980s. She makes the generalization that all of these ideas constitute Afrocentrism, and then implies that this ‘Afrocentrism’ is being widely taught in college classrooms. Has it ever occurred to her that proponents of African American studies are divided into numerous categories, influenced by disciplinary affiliations, ideological backgrounds, and political affiliations? Conservative, feminist, deconstructionist, and Marxist scholars in Notes 213 black studies programs and departments have long and vocally opposed romantic and sentimental Afrochauvinism—indeed, far longer than she has” (Moses, 6, 9–10, 226). 29. Walker, 41. 30. Walker, 59. 31. Walker, 91. 32. Walker, 92. 33. Again, I refer the reader to Moses’ Afrotopia, which shows quite clearly that Afrocentrism cannot be reduced to Egyptocentrism and anti-Semiti sm. Such reductions, among other things, ignore the prominent role of “white Afrocentrist,” especially Jewish scholars, such as Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits.

Load more