The Power of Institutionalized Disciplinarity: Molefi Asante’s Visionary and Pioneering Contributions to African American Studies

The Context: The European American University, “One Big Intellectual Ghetto”

One of Asante’s (2007, p. 103) chief concerns has been African disenfranchisement and marginalization in the intellectual arena. The mechanism responsible for this state of affairs is a conspicuous presence of Europe, which has allowed the European cultural and historical experience to become invisible and infiltrate African people’s consciousness. Parading and hiding as “universal” and “objective,” its European specificity has become, to a large degree, unrecognizable. Yet, as Molefi Asante (1998) remarks, what passes for universalism amounts to nothing more than “Eurocentric ideology” (p. 1), while so-called objectivity is better understood as “a kind of collective subjectivity of European culture” (p. 1).

This imposition of Europe, under the guise of objectivity and universalism, is part and parcel of a narrative of White superiority, a “racial mythology,” based on the “rather strange belief on the parts of whites that they are superior to Africans, that they have a right to establish and maintain a hierarchy over blacks by force of arms or customs or laws or habits” (Asante, 2007, p. 136). It is rather easy to see, however, how this strange belief is inseparable from the self-serving notion that only Europeans are capable of agency, or at least to a much higher degree than other people in the world.

In his insightful book The Colonizer’s model of the world, Blaut (1993) explains how, starting in the 16th to 17th centuries and culminating in the 19th century, Europeans embraced diffusionism to account for their self-proclaimed superiority. According to this metatheory, the world is made up of two parts, one characterized by cultural and intellectual inventiveness, the other by uninventiveness. Quite predictably, the uniquely creative human communities “remain the permanent centers of culture change, of progress” (Blaut, 1993, p. 14). Consequently, “At the global scale, this gives us a model of a world with a single center—roughly, Greater Europe—and a single periphery; an Inside and an Outside” (Blaut, 1993, p. 14). The rest of the world is, therefore, condemned to consume European intellectual and material products, due to its own creative impotence. Worse yet, the rest of the world is to wait on Europe to be rescued from its cultural and historical lethargy.

So dormant have the Africans been that some Europeans went so far as to suggest that not only we had failed to progress (that is, to become like Europeans), but we might even have been regressing when Europeans stepped in and saved us from sinking back into sheer bestiality. ¹

Likewise, Hegel’s theory about Africa’s ahistoricalness was also generated by the diffusionist paradigm. As one of the central pillars of this paradigm is that Africans are deprived of agency, it was a foregone conclusion that African history could not exist. Hegel explains that what he calls “Black Africa”

has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with any integral ingredient of culture. From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, for ever pressing in upon conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night. (cited in Eze, 1997, p. 124)

The same author continues, with his typical arrogance and contempt toward Africans, that “What we understand as Africa proper is that unhistorical and undeveloped land which is still enmeshed in the natural spirit, and which had to be mentioned here before we cross the threshold of world history itself” (cited in Eze, 1997, p. 142).

Within the diffusionist perspective, it is then only when Africans encounter Europeans that they truly start to exist as human beings, admittedly retarded ones. This explains labels like “under-developed,” “developing.” Truly, Africans (and other “others”) are defined by their experiences with Europeans. Whether acquiescing or resisting to them, Africans somehow only exist as a result of Europeans’ interventions in our lives, as those brutal and aggressive acts of imposition are always and implicitly assumed to be the defining moments in the African experience. The common division of African history in two periods, “precolonial” and “colonial” attests to this Eurocentric historiography. European disruption of African societies is assigned a central place in “African” history. The British historian, Trevor-Ropper (1965) expressed as well as any this idea:

Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history. (Quoted in Munhamu Pekeshe, Tribute to Pioneer of African History, the Patriot, February 16, 2017, p. 1)

Further echoing commonly accepted Eurocentric ideas of social Darwinism and linear universalism, the same author Trevor-Ropper (1973) also stressed how:

Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped. (p. 9)

Thus, through a racist and arrogant discourse that claimed European monopoly over cultural and historical agency, Europeans scholars contributed to the establishment of a discursive space that effectively places Europe at the center of the world, while relegating Africans to a marginal position. The violence that this process of imposition entails can hardly be underestimated, and nor can its psychological and mental ravages be ignored. What happens here is that Europe attempts to occupy all human space. The European experience becomes the yardstick by which other people’s humanity (or lack of) will be evaluated. Yet, the European experience is nothing more and nothing less than one experience among many. Asante (1998) remarks how “The aggressive seizure of intellectual space, like the seizure of land, amounts to occupying some else’s territory and claiming it as one’s own. When this happens, cultural analysis takes a back seat to galloping ethnocentric interpretations of phenomena” (p. 10).

What educational institutions functioning within the Eurocentric premises deliver is not true education, Asante (2007) contends, but Eurocentric triumphalist propaganda, “a racist education, that is, a white supremacist education” (p. 82). In such a context, the development of history, philosophy, mathematics, writing, arts, religion are automatically, and without any questions, attributed to Europe, as a result of the so-called Greek miracle. Yet, closer scrutiny of the facts would compel advocates of the Greek miracle theory to far more humble and reasonable claims.

One of the consequences of the denial of African agency has been the conspicuous absence of African people, whose presence became invisible even to ourselves, and whose existence was denied: “Africans have been negated in the system of white racial domination. This is not mere marginalization, but the obliteration of the presence, meaning, activities, or images of the African. This is negated reality, a destruction of the spiritual and material personality of the African person” (Asante, 1998, p. 41). Consistent with this denial of Africa was its inferiorization,

With regards to African literature, history, behavior, and economics, the Eurocentric writers have always positioned Africa in the inferior place with regards to every subject field. This has been a deliberate falsification of the record. It is one of the greatest conspiracies in the history of the world because what was agreed upon, tacitly, writer after writer was that Africa should be marginalized in the literature and downgraded when it seemed that the literature spoke with high regard to Africa. (Asante, 1998, p. 45)

As a result of this overall obliteration and inferiorization, Africans have often “lost sense of their cultural ground” (Asante, 2007, p. 35) and often live in a state of mental and cultural exile. Asante writes of the Africans as a people who have been “relegated to the fringes of the society” (1998, p. 39), “de-centered” (2003b, p. 5) and “dislocated,” as a result of European cultural (and intellectual) imperialism.

The Result: Slave Studies Under the Guise of African American Studies

Given the unproblematization of the Eurocentric paradigm, which denies African historical and cultural agency as one of its main tenets, it should come as no surprise that Black Studies, or African American Studies, or Africana Studies as it is now popularly called, could not have escaped the epistemological pitfalls of such a paradigm. (Asante, 1991a).

According to Molefi Asante, much of what passes for Africana Studies is in fact Slave Studies. Slave studies rests, among other things, on a Eurocentric historiography according to which African Americans did not truly exist prior to European enslavement, that is, prior to the Europeans’ violent interference with African freedom on American soil. Thus, one will write books and essays on “slave religion,” “slave community,” “slave family,” “slave narratives,” “slave folklore,” “slave traditions,” and so on, without questioning the very notion of slave. Yet, Asante insists, “One cannot study Africans in the United States or Brazil or Jamaica without some appreciation for the historical and cultural significance of Africa as source and origin.” Such a posture is “reactionary” for “it disconnects the African in America from thousands of years of history and tradition” (2003b p. 15). Such a disconnection presents African Americans as “made-in-America Negroes” without historical depth” (2003b p. 15). Let us reiterate, however, that it is precisely because Africans were denied agency as Africans, and thus described as historically nonexistent and culturally shallow that African Americans cannot be perceived a priori as anything but made-in-America Negroes” or as slaves or descendants of slaves. Again, these alleged historical and cultural deficiencies are the consequence of African lack of agency, a function of our inferiority. It is only when placed in contact with Europeans that Africans can exist; hence, 1619 is the beginning of African history in the United States.

A survey of the theories developed to account for African culture in the Americas will allow us to better grasp the flaws inherent in analyses grounded in the Eurocentric paradigm, that is, ultimately devoid of African agency.

One of the most prevalent Eurocentric theories elaborated to account for African American culture is the Damage Theory (Alleyne, 1988, p. 19). This theory quite simply states that the Africans having been prevented from maintaining specific ethnic bonds, and having been placed in a state of extreme social-psychological deprivation because of the brutality of slavery, which supposedly “dehumanized” us, it became impossible for us to continue engaging in our original cultural practices. This meant the quasi impossibility for any significant cultural continuity from Africa to the Americas. Hence, all culture displayed by Africans in the Americas was created on site, through original innovations. This is precisely what the Creativity and Innovation theory argues: deprived of their original and familiar cultural blueprint, the Africans had no choice but to invent a brand new culture. In the arena of language, for example, Creole languages are believed by some Eurocentric linguists to be modeled after some universal genetic bioprogram, as the Africans allegedly not only stopped speaking their native languages, but forgot them altogether. Let us note, however, that not all Eurocentric scholars are so generous, as some argue that we failed to develop a culture altogether and had to rely instead on imitating, most often poorly, Europeans. In that context, Creole languages are nothing but “broken English,” “broken French,” and so on. More recently, some scholars have emphasized resistance as the major theme in the lives of enslaved Africans. Far from acquiescing to their oppression, Africans used every opportunity to resist their oppressors. While there is indeed ample evidence that Africans undermined the plantation system itself, and that resistance to slavery is as old as slavery itself, the stress on resistance as the dominant theme in African lives is nonetheless problematic inasmuch as it still places Europeans at the center. One cannot account for cultural practices grounded in Africa simply as a form of resistance. In Haiti, to use one example, Africans did not engage in Vodu solely or even primarily because the latter would allow them to defeat the French, but first and foremost because Vodu was their ancestral religion, and as such, an intricate part of the worldview they carried within, as Africans. Even after the defeat of their French enslavers, Haitians continued to practice Vodu. Commenting on the link between religion and resistance in Jamaica, Mervyn Alleyne (1988) similarly notes that though “religion was taken to Jamaica from Africa and was an important basis for resistance; it was not created during the course of that resistance,” and concludes that what religion among enslaved and Maroon Africans in Jamaica demonstrated was “first and foremost the continuity of an ancestral religion (p. 21). In short, the Damage, as well as the Resistance theory “share the position that slavery was the decisive factor” (Alleyne, 1988, p. 20), and as such, both participate in slave studies.

A telling and rather recent example of slave studies parading as “Africana Studies” is provided by Mario Azevedo and Gregory Davis’s (2005) essay entitled “Religion in the Diaspora”. The whole article is devoted primarily to the Christian church among Africans in the United States and the Caribbean although it includes, at the end, a shorter survey of the Nation of Islam in the United States. Thus, upon reading this essay, one is forced to conclude either that only Western religions qualify as true religions, and/or that the Africans in the Diaspora quickly abandoned their original African religion and wholeheartedly embraced alien ones. Both conclusions are consistent with the Eurocentric paradigm, and both, of course, are quite problematic as they rest on defective assumptions. First, there have been enough scholarly studies of African religion to establish that Africans, contrary to common European assertions, had developed a religion of their own long before Christianity and Islam came into being (for a thorough survey of African religion, see Asante & Mazama, 2009). Second, it is simply untrue that Diasporic Africans abandoned their original religion. Certainly, the persistence and thriving of Vodu, Santeria, Candomblé, Lucumi, Obeah, Palo, Conjuring—all religious traditions with undeniable African roots, are well attested throughout the Diaspora and speak volumes about the continuing reference to African culture, including African religion, by Diasporic Africans. Finally, the conversion of Africans to Christianity has often been largely exaggerated, probably in a conscious or unconscious attempt to legitimize the depiction of enslaved Africans and their descendants as long-time, deep-hearted Christians. Historical evidence, however, suggests otherwise, as in 1840, only 8% of the African population in the United States were officially listed as members of Protestant churches (Wood, 1990, p. 141). By 1860, that is only 5 years before the abolition of slavery, less than 11% of the Black population could be listed as Christians. The question that comes to one’s mind, of course, is: what did the remaining 89% believe in and practice? I would like to point out how, given their Eurocentric orientation, Azevedo and Davis could not even pose such a question, let alone suggest an answer. Their hasty and uncritical acceptance of implicit notions of African cultural deficiency or weakness, which are central to the modern Eurocentric paradigm, predetermined the questions they could ask and answer about the African experience outside of Africa. Within the modern European paradigm, Africans are automatically expected to be consumers of European cultural ideas and practices, incapable of articulating valid cultural and historical truths of their own. Azevedo and Davis’s treatment of religion among Diasporic Africans was only used to illustrate how failure to place African agency at the center of one’s analysis of, and approach to the African experience necessarily leads to the production of slave studies or colonial studies, whereby Africans are necessarily defined in relation to Europeans. As aptly captured by Asante (1998),

Without African agency as a key part of the theoretical frame, whites remain smug in their old habits of believing that Africans did not have civilization prior to contact with whites, that Africans never invented or created anything, that Africans are inferior beings to whites, and that the United States is solely a white project. (p. 41)

Reclaiming Space for Africa: Afrocentricity

Clearly, Asante is preoccupied with and committed to identifying and setting in motion the mechanism that will put an end to African marginalization, through historical and cultural misrepresentation and negation of African agency. This mechanism he has called Afrocentricity and defined most recently as seeking to “obliterate the mental, physical, cultural and economic dislocation of African people by thrusting Africans as centered, healthy human beings in the context of African thought” (Asante, 2007, p. 120; italics added). The purpose is to “escape from the anomie of fringeness” (Asante, 1998, p. 41). Asante believes that it is only in the process of reassuming in a most conscious manner our sense of historical and cultural agency that we, Africans, can hope to put an end to our invisibility, debilitation, and powerlessness. Asante’s rhetoric of liberation, through which he attempts to create and reclaim space for African people, therefore, stresses the African as actor and victor. In fact, “the Afrocentric idea is unthinkable without African agency,” explains Asante (1998, p. 19) who defines agency as “an attitude toward action originating in African experiences” (Asante, 2003, p. 3). More specifically, “An agent, in our terms, must mean a human being who is capable of acting independently in his or her own best interest. Agency itself is the ability to provide the psychological and cultural resources necessary for the advancement of human freedom” (Asante, 2007, p. 40)

Molefi Asante’s language is informed and dominated by spatial terms: center, location, place, space, situatedness, dislocation, fringes, margins, footnote, and relocation are indeed key words in the Afrocentric vocabulary created by Asante, as part of his theoretical apparatus. All of these terms refer either to a geometrical figure or point, or a physical position or movement. What those spatial terms allow Asante to convey is the intrinsically dynamic nature of Afrocentricity, ² and of the African as actor. The Afrocentric African is acting, not acted upon, for she is no longer satisfied to be “the dark toy/ in someone else’s carnival/ or in someone else field/ the obsolete scarecrow” (Césaire, 1960, p. 81; my translation). Instead, she stands in her own center.

Agency is the activating principle that allows our center to be a true home, that is, a source of nurturing existential paradigms. Africanity is not to be confused with Afrocentricity. Being born in Africa, living in Africa, does not make one Afrocentric, as explained by Asante (2007) himself: “Only those who are consciously African, given to appreciating the need to resist annihilation culturally, politically, and economically, can claim to be adequately in the arena of Afrocentricity” (2007, p. 47). Again, one may be culturally exiled although living in Africa. This happens, for example, when one practices alien traditions, such as worshipping foreign gods, or defending and promoting alien concepts and theories.

Afrocentricity and Africology

Applying Afrocentricity to the academic arena, Asante (1990) suggested that the proper study of African phenomena—assuming that the goal of such study was to help liberate African people’s “suppressed and oppressed truths,” could only be Afrocentric, that is, grounded in the observation of the African experience from the standpoint of African people as agents rather than objects, and as victorious rather than victims:

Africology is defined, therefore, as the Afrocentric study of phenomena, events, ideas, and personalities related to Africa. The mere study of phenomena is not Africology but some other intellectual enterprise. The scholar who generates questions based on the centrality of Africa is engaged in a very different research inquiry than the one who imposes Western criteria on the phenomena. (p. 140)

Two important questions are raised here. One is the imperative for the African scholar to realize that scholarship is praxis. As such, one’s scholarship cannot claim to be “neutral,” or “objective”: much to the contrary, it must be consciously oriented in such a manner that it will be of service to the African community, out of obligation to one’s community. Given that Afrocentricity was identified as the indispensable remedy to end our disenfranchisement and inferiorization, African scholars must exercise their own agency, that is, embrace the Afrocentric paradigm.

The second question that is being raised concerns a most critical epistemological issue: the paradigm that one uses is bound to determine the configuration and the outcome of the intellectual inquiry under way. Kuhn, a Western philosopher of science interested in identifying the process through which a particular mode of scientific thought and practice becomes established as an accepted or dominant mode, helped make explicit the existence of premises upon which all intellectual inquiries are necessarily based, thus rendering the idea of scientific neutrality untenable. Any paradigm represents by definition a conscious or unconscious commitment to a set of metaphysical assumptions, beliefs, a particular methodology, certain methods and techniques, and so on. This is why the Eurocentric metaparadigm can only produce slave studies. Joyce Joyce (2006) is at best naïve when she makes the simple-minded assertion that “Rather than imposing a paradigm on the subject of inquiry, the subject or text under investigation should symbiotically determine the paradigm” (p. 196). Human consciousness determines what may constitute a subject, to begin with. Subjects do not exist in some out of worldly space, to be retrieved by detached and objective scholars. The very construction of anything as a subject is itself dictated by one’s worldview. After all, until recently, most Eurocentric scholars did not consider that African history could be a subject of inquiry, as they believed that there was no such thing as African history in the first place. In that respect, one should interrogate Noliwe Rooks’s (2006) decision to write a book White Money, Black Power. In this book, Rooks (2006) gives the unsettling impression that Black Studies ultimately came into existence thanks to the Ford Foundation. Although the author is careful enough to state that “the Ford Foundation wholeheartedly supported an integrationist rationale and refused to fund programs and groups that couched their requests for assistance within the rhetoric of Black Power” (p. 22), her work quite certainly belittles African agency and its role in demanding and creating space for African people within the academy. After all, as the Ford Foundation refused to support Black Power claims, then, why allow the title of her book to imply that Black Power and Black Nationalists had been supported, or worse, bought by wealthy Whites because they were not? Clearly, Rooks’ subject was dictated by her own ideological and cultural location. As Molefi Asante (1998) explains,

One is either involved from one place or another; one cannot be in a place that does not exist since all places are positions. I cannot conceive of an anti-perspective because whatever I perceive of I am using a place, a position, a location, even it is called an anti-perspective perspective in European terms. (p. 47) ³

Most importantly, in arguing that genuine African American Studies must be informed by the Afrocentric paradigm, Asante is also making a case for African American Studies as a discipline of its own. As Slave Studies or Colonial Studies, African American Studies has functioned largely as an ethnic appendage to European disciplines, adding some surface color and exotic flavor to an ocean of intellectual Whiteness. African American Studies has been and continues to be conceived as an endeavor defined primarily by its subject matter, the Black experience and its “multidimensional aspects,” to quote Maulana Karenga (1993, p. 21). The defining criterion for Africana Studies is its shared subject, that is, Black people’s historical and cultural experiences, with Blackness functioning as a unifying theme. The Blackness of the scholars is even used by some, like Clarke Hine, to define Black Studies. Being defined by its subject matter, it follows that Africana Studies is multidisciplinary.

However, what does interdisciplinary mean or entail? First, let us realize that interdisciplinarity is by definition integrative. Interdisciplinarity subsumes four possible scenarios: (a) cross disciplines borrowing, (b) collaborative work for the sake of problem solving, (c) bridge-building between disciplines that retain their own integrity, or (d) the constitution of new field from overlapping areas of concrete disciplines. Although never or rarely articulated in a self-conscious manner, it seems that the last scenario is what scholars who claim that Africana Studies is interdisciplinary have in mind. In other words, Africana Studies, in that schema of affairs, would be constituted of segments of European disciplines. And this is the list of the European disciplines which have contributed to the constitution of Africana Studies, as suggested by James Stewart (1992, p. 23): anthropology, archeology, economics, geography, political science, English, history, philosophy, religious studies, dance, drama, visual broadcast, film, journalism, speech, adult curriculum, preschool education, primary education, secondary education, special education, vocational education, higher education, chemistry, genetics, mathematics and physics. And, of course, this is an open-ended list.

Thus, according to the interdisciplinary model, all the above listed disciplines would be considered Africana Studies’ parent disciplines, a somewhat embarrassing term. In reality, the dominant intellectual practice has been a so-called “Blackenization” of European disciplines, that is, the exploration of the Black experience within the confines of European disciplines. Thus, we have Black Sociology, Black Psychology, Black Women Studies or Black History, and so on.

However, as noted by Stewart, there is no guarantee that the prefixation of the word “black” entails any major epistemic transformation of the European disciplinary construct. In fact, it would be surprising if it did given that Blackness is not attached to a particular cultural space, that is, to a particular cosmology or epistemology. Lewis and Jane Gordon (2006) rejoice over the fact that “Such topics as epigraphicalism, jazz consciousness, Africana existential foundations of slave pedagogy, African-American Queer Studies and post-European and postcontinental reason, to name a few, indicate an unusual level of intellectual vibrancy [of African American Studies]” (p. xxx). The common denominator of those “disciplinary subjects” is obviously quite thin, and where the Gordons see fertility, others may detect stunted growth as a result of a deficient self-concept.

It would be difficult to deny some of the negative consequences of defining African American Studies as “interdisciplinary” or “multidisciplinary.” Chief among them is the fact that African American Studies remains quite dependent upon European disciplines, and this can be quite problematic given the built-in and unacknowledged Eurocentric bias of European disciplines, which allegedly rely on universal and objective facts. It is a quite ironic and treacherous endeavor for an African scholar, for example, to be involved in Anthropology, a discipline devoted to the study of the “other.” Referring to oneself as a “Black Anthropologist” will not suffice, I fear, to settle the question posed here.

Furthermore, the conceptualization of African American Studies as interdisciplinary manifests itself through joint appointments, and a profusion of cross-listed courses, all breeding extreme disciplinary fragmentation.

This situation, however, is created by African American Studies’ weak and permeable boundaries, which allows for encroachments from European disciplines—and which may also make it harder for Africana Studies faculty to defend and strengthen their departments. The end result is confusion and vulnerability. It is arguable, for example, that the study of African American homosexuals belongs less to African American Studies and more to Queer Studies, or that Black Women Studies belongs to Women Studies rather than to African American Studies.

Molefi Asante argues that African American Studies’ greater autonomy, both epistemologically and institutionally, will be achieved only through a redefinition of the discipline not by subject matter, but by the systematic and conscious adoption of a conceptual framework generated by Africans themselves, that is, Afrocentricity. This conceptual framework should function as a metaparadigm, and foster the articulation of theories, the development of specific research questions, as well as the use of certain methods of inquiry, all providing Africana Studies scholars with unique disciplinary insights, leading to the production of emancipatory knowledge, consistently with African American Studies’ original charge of liberating African people from mental disenfranchisement and incarceration, while providing African American Studies with more resistant boundaries.

An Afrocentric theory, Asante writes (2007: 102), is one that is constructed to give Africans a centered role in their own phenomena. It is an attack on marginality and peripheralization of Africans. There can be as many Afrocentric theories as the scholar seeks to create, all operating within the same general Afrocentric framework. While the Africologists can explore the relationship of other theories to the phenomena of Africans, the sine qua non of the africological adventure is Afocentricity.

As a metaparadigm for Africology, Afrocentricity includes three major aspects: cognitive, structural, and functional. The cognitive aspect involves the metaphysical foundations –such as an organizing principle and a set of presuppositions, a methodology, methods, concepts, and theories (Mazama, 2003). The organizing principle of the Afrocentric paradigm, for instance, is the centrality of the African experience for African people. Such centrality determines the perception of all reality. The structural aspect refers to the existence of an Afrocentric intellectual community, such as found at Temple University. Finally, the functional aspect of the Afrocentric paradigm refers to the ability of the latter to activate African people’s consciousness and compel them to exercise their agency, thus bringing them closer to freedom, the ultimate goal of Afrocentricity, and it was once said, of African American Studies as well.

The Journal of Black Studies

In 1968, Asante founded (in collaboration with Robert Singleton) the Journal of Black Studies. Asante became and remained the journal’s chief editor, making it, over the years, the most prestigious journal in African American Studies, with a strong peer review process, ⁴ a predictable and regular publication, a readership of over 3,500 in the United States and Canada, and also in Africa, South America, and Europe, as well as an editorial board comprising distinguished intellectuals lending their name to the journal’s endeavor, thus accruing its credibility. The purpose of the Journal of Black Studies was and remains to provide Black Studies scholars with a venue to publish their research. As censorship is quite strong in Eurocentric intellectual circles, Asante determined that it was imperative to create an intellectually safe space for research on African people, from the perspective of Africans as agents, rather than “victims, problems and objects” (Lehman, 2005, p. 287). Every year, hundreds of scholars, many from reputable European universities, submit manuscripts to the Journal of Black Studies, thus further attesting that the legitimacy of African American Studies is no longer an issue. Therefore, by successfully building the Journal of Black Studies’ reputation over the years, Molefi Asante provided Africology with a powerful institutional tool, thus furthering its establishment as a discipline. The Black Scholar, which started at the same time as the Journal of Black Studies, and which embraced Marxism, was not as successful. In fact, its financial struggles interfered with its steady publication, and prevented it from playing as significant a role in the institutionalization of Africana Studies.

The Ph.D. in African American Studies

The creation of the first PhD program in African American Studies, under the leadership of Molefi Asante was a critical moment in the institutionalization of Africana Studies as a discipline, for at least two reasons. First, the significance of Africana Studies’ ability to grant the PhD cannot be underestimated given that, as Swoboda (1979) reminds us,

By the turn of the century, the doctorate had become the ticket of admission to membership in American academic life. The doctorate, of course, certified not only teaching ability but the ability to do research—and research of a strictly disciplinary nature at that. (p. 77)

The creation of the first PhD program in Africana Studies transcended “the parochial and provincial role which had been assigned to the field by keepers of the Academy” (Asante, 1991, p. 103), and help further establish Africana Studies as a discipline in its own right. Second, intricately woven in Asante’s proposal for the PhD and MA programs in African American Studies was Afrocentricity as African American Studies’ metaparadigm. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere (Mazama, 2003a), Asante’s ability to transform Afrocentricity into a paradigm, that is, to make Africology a reality, depended in large measure on the existence of a community of practitioners which the creation of the first PhD program at Temple University brought almost immediately into existence. Scores of national and international students, attracted by the progressiveness of Afrocentricity, enrolled in the program, and proceeded to explore their various research interests from an Afrocentric perspective. Africology therefore came into existence as a result of those numerous research projects pursued within the Afrocentric paradigm. Asante alone directed over 120 PhD dissertations between 1988 and 2008.

Through the approval of the PhD in African American Studies, Asante was able to further establish the legitimation of Afrocentricity as an intellectual idea and of Africology as a discipline. Interestingly enough, the same year the PhD program as approved, Temple University published Asante’s second major work on Afrocentricity, The Afrocentric Idea (1987, with a second edition in 1998). The endorsement of Temple University ipso facto meant greater institutionalization, and in the end, Asante’s skillfully and carefully planned discipline building strategy was quite successful. In the wake of the creation of the first PhD program at Temple University, several other doctoral programs in Africana Studies came into existence at other universities. Asante’s vision of a PhD program in Africology became reality in June 2008, with the approval by the Board of Trustees of the University of Milwaukee of just such a program.

The Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference

In October 1988, that is, the very same semester the PhD program was initiated, Molefi Kete Asante called the first Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference, as a part of his strategy to build Africology as a discipline. The conference, which has since met every month of October, effectively created an additional institution supportive of African American Studies. According to Garvey Lundy (2005, p. 183), “The Cheikh Anta Diop Conference had three objectives: (1) introduction of the new discipline, (2) professional and collegial networking among students and faculty in Black Studies, (3) advancement of disciplinary knowledge around the Afrocentric idea.” The conference quickly became established and maintained its leadership on Africological matters, attracting participants literally from all over the world. On average, about 300 national and international scholars converge to Philadelphia to attend the conference each year: “Considered by professionals in the field of Black Studies as one of the key conferences each year, the Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference has achieved the singular status of most preferred professional conference in African American Studies” (Lundy, 2005, p. 184). Its ability to meet consistently, to demonstrate, throughout the years, an exemplary organization, thus establishing a model and an expectation for African excellence and commitment, allowed the Cheikh Anta Diop Conference to become a significant institution. One cannot underestimate the role played by the conference in providing a space for Afrocentric scholarship and exchanges, thus contributing to the development and maintenance of an Africological community, and ultimately, to the disciplinary status of African American Studies.

In addition to creating three significant institutions, as part of his weaponry in the struggle to further institutionalize African American Studies, Asante also started writing at a dazzling pace about Afrocentricity and matters of concerns for Afrocentric-minded people, and became, by all accounts, the most productive contemporary African scholar.

Asante understood quite well that building Africology at Temple University would only be truly successful if the Temple model was to be replicated elsewhere, thus reinforcing the disciplinary status of Africana Studies via widespread institutionalization. Roy (1979), already cited, had mentioned that the existence of 10 departments claiming for disciplinary status. While one may dispute the number, the point is well taken, however, that as many units as possible are desirable to bring about and strengthen a discipline. The larger the number of practitioners, the greater the entrenchment of the paradigm and the discipline. Furthermore, dislocation and disenfranchisement are, unfortunately, not limited to Philadelphia or Temple students, and the domestic need for Afrocentricity is at least as great as the nation itself. Asante’s (2007) goal was to revolutionize Africana Studies through a paradigmatic shift, moving African people from “a pathetic arena of marginality” (p. 166) to a restorative centeredness. Asante thus undertook to explain and propagate Afrocentricity, both within the academy and the community.

The journals influential in the diffusion of Asante’s work were, of course, The Journal of Black Studies, which Asante used as a privileged venue to expound on Afrocentricity. He consistently allowed and encouraged others similarly inclined to publish in the Journal. Molefi Asante also spearheaded the creation of Imhotep, for the dissemination of Afrocentric ideas. Asante trusted graduate students with the editorial responsibility of Imhotep, to allow them to gain experience. Between 1989 and 1992, the Department of African American Studies at Temple University also sponsored the publication of Maat, by the National Afrocentric Institute, one of the department’s institutes. Maat was distributed in the Black community, as well as to all HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Asante published regularly in Maat, as he tried to familiarize lay people with the concept of Afrocentricity, and garner popular support for Africology. Furthermore, and still consistent with his strategy to develop venues of dissemination of Afrocentric scholarship, Molefi Asante encouraged his faculty to create their own journals. Thus came into existence, with full departmental support, the Afrocentric Journal of Contemporary Theater and the Journal of Dance, both edited by faculty within the department.

The most influential press in the diffusion of Asante’s work on Afrocentricity is, without a doubt, Africa World Press. The latter published Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change in 1988, and 2 years later, Asante’s masterpiece on Afrocentricity, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Asante’s affiliation with Africa World Press immediately brought the latter to the attention of the Afrocentric research community, and many Afrocentric scholars proceeded to have their work published by Africa World Press, which then became an important and effective tool in the development of Africology as a discipline. More recently, however, Asante has relied on Sage, the publisher of the Journal of Black Studies, to publish important works, such as The Encyclopedia of Black Studies (in collaboration with Ama Mazama, 2005), and the Handbook of Black Studies (in collaboration with Maulana Karenga, 2006). Both books are designed to provide canonical standards to the discipline.

Asante, however, was not solely concerned with spreading Afrocentricity at the college level, but was equally anxious to introduce the Afrocentric idea as early as possible in the educational experience of African children in particular. In that respect, his greatest impact was felt with his publication, in 1995, of African American History: A Journey of Liberation, a text designed for middle and high school students. Asante (1995) explains how this book “is a history written from inside an African center and with an African-centered voice; it sings the praises of the ancestors and it tells the honest story of the African American in this country” (p. v). Asante (1995) further describes “the joy of ownership—of seeing oneself and one’s ancestors as active agents who create and change the history of this nation—that overflows and stimulates a hunger to know more” (p. v). Similarly, Asante created a manual on how to set up Afrocentric study groups.

Recent developments suggest the internationalization of the Afrocentric idea. Certainly, Molefi Asante’s intellectual presence has been more intensely felt abroad lately, through lectures and publications. For example, Afrocentricity was translated in French in 2003 and published in Paris (Ménaibuc), while An Afrocentric Manifesto was published in 2007 in England (Polity Press). In a similar vein, Asante has made increased appearances in China, where he is regularly invited, as the poignant relevance of the centric idea has not been lost on many Chinese intellectuals grappling with Western supremacy.

At the end of this survey, it is rather evident that Molefi Kete Asante’s impact on Africana Studies, both in terms of institutionalization and substance in the past 30 years remains unequaled. Indeed, a visionary and brilliant intellectual warrior, Molefi Asante single-handedly initiated an epistemological revolution that shook the very foundations of White intellectual hegemony, while ushering in a new era for the study of African phenomena, one centered around the assertion of the primacy of African agency for African people. Molefi Asante was the first to articulate and propose a solution to what many might had sensed before, that is, that “An ideology for liberation must find its existence in ourselves, it cannot be external to us, and it cannot be imposed by those other than ourselves; it must be derived from our particular historical and cultural experience” (Asante, 1988, p. 41). For this priceless gift, we are forever thankful.