PLATFORM : Invented Tradition
Afrocentrism is Eurocentrism in blackface. The tools and categories it uses to analyze society and culture are Western, not African. What I mean is that the notion of a classical civilization is a Western idea. Afrocentrism, in brief, does not transcend European categories of analysis; it repeats them and thus is circular. Furthermore, it is not multicultural; it claims a priority over other cultures in the West in the same way that Anglo-Saxonism did in the 19th Century.
When viewed from this perspective, Afrocentrism is nothing more than another exercise in the invention of tradition.
The ancestors of black Americans who were taken from the continent we now call Africa did not identify themselves by the cognomen African. At the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, there were no Africans; the slaves identified themselves by tribal names. In short, there was no collective identity that could be called African.
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