The Afrocentric Project: The Quest for Particularity and the Negation of Objectivity

Abstract

This article is a philosophical critique of a very controversial paradigm within Africana Studies. The methodology employed in this paper is a philosophical critique of the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of Afrocentricity. The quest for a distinctive (metaphysical) Africanist perspective has cast Afrocentricity as a subjectivist approach to affirming the in­ tegrity of an Africana existential condition. While in the course of African American intellectual history a number of scholars and thinkers have supported the notion of an unique Black metaphysics, Afrocentricity brings to the table ap­ proach to the tradition of affirming an African metaphysical exclusivism. What I mean by the quest for particularity is the notion that there is a unique Africana presence in the world, such that it stands antithetical to the EuropeanlWestern ex­ perience. I explore what I call "weak Afrocentricity," i.e., a cul­ tu ral determinism demarcating the African and European ex­ perience. Afrocentricity, in positing a cultural relativism, ren­ der s that not only is Eurocentrism a false universality. but that universality per se is false. This denial of universality (at the ontological level) has as a corresponding category the nega­ tion of objectivity (at the epistemological plane). I examine the works of two leading Afrocentric proponents, Molefi Asante and Marimba Ani, arguably two of the most significant con­ tributors to the philosophical foundations of Afrocentricity.