Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate
In particular, North Atlantic scholarly production on Africa situates itself in a critical environment informed by the search among African and African-American intellectuals for self-identity and a global birthright. Afrocentrism has emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a powerful mobilizing force. As from 1987, Afrocentrist claims have sought to derive an additional empirical basis as well as respectability from Bernal's Black Athena project. Bernal attributes to one African society, that of Ancient Egypt, a controversially large influence on the genesis of the North Atlantic, and subsequently global, civilization. In the context of this debate, this second part of the project seeks to explore the construction and deconstruction of images of Africa by Black intellectuals in the twentieth century, to assess the cultural continuities between Ancient Egypt and other African cultures, and most importantly, to define the methodological constraints of such a task. From my complementary homepage on Ancient models of thought you may access:
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page last modified: 11-04-99