Afrocentricity: How to Evaluate a Contested Paradigm

by bam

Afrocentricity is a specific, named academic paradigm: Molefi Kete Asante coined the term, and its intellectual roots run through the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. It is also genuinely contested. This course does the hard thing, it teaches Afrocentricity as its proponents define it, presents its strongest claims from their own books, AND presents the substantive academic criticism from the critics' own books, without picking a side or asserting a contested claim as settled fact. You will work through the two most famous debates it produced (Was ancient Egypt a Black African civilization? and the Black Athena exchange), learn to separate rigorous Afrocentric scholarship from pop-Afrocentric myth, and walk away with a transferable skill: how to evaluate any paradigm that is part legitimate corrective and part overcorrection. Built for high school students and adult learners. Cited to Asante, Diop, Bernal, Lefkowitz, Howe, Appiah, mainstream Egyptology, and recent ancient-DNA research (APA 7 + a Sources list on every lesson).