Elegant Inconsistencies: Race, Nation, and Writing in Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s Afrotopia

In 1998, the historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses published his fifth monograph, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, as part of Cambridge University Press’s highly regarded “Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.” This would seem to be an odd publishing venue for a historian, but in earlier books Moses had written eloquently on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and throughout his career, textual analysis has been central to his influential studies of black nationalism.¹ In many respects, then, the Cambridge series was the ideal venue, and the book was widely noticed, with numerous appreciative reviews appearing in journals devoted to American history and African-American studies. Nevertheless, the leading journals in American literary studies, including American Literary History and American Literature, ignored Afrotopia, and the book has not had a significant impact on American and African-American literary studies. However ardent the talk among literary scholars about the importance of interdisciplinarity, ours remains a discipline-focused and -organized profession in which literary scholars generally speak to literary scholars and historians to historians.² Moses aspires to speak across the disciplines, and in Afrotopia he makes a signal contribution to African-American literary and cultural studies by examining African diasporic affiliations in light of contradictions, rather than romanticized celebrations of resistance. Afrotopia may well be his best book, and for its complex readings of the dynamic place of Africa in the writings of a range of African-American intellectuals, it deserves our renewed attention.

At first glance, Afrotopia can seem merely topical, a disquisition on the debates of the 1980s and 1990s on Afrocentricism. At the outset, Moses addresses the controversy surrounding the first two volumes of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987, 1991), which he regards as a serious act of scholarship that nonetheless participates in a long history of sometimes romanticized efforts by whites and blacks alike to link African Americans to a dynastic history with sources in ancient Egypt. Moses exposes the opportunism and racism of Bernal’s most vociferous critic, Mary Lefkowitz, whose Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996) was intent on demonstrating the white racial “purity” of ancient Egypt, and he raises questions as well about what he regards as the mythified Egyptocentricism and Afrocentrism popularized by Molefi Asante in such works as Afrocentricity, the Theory of Social Change (1980) and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990). In his opening chapters, Moses also takes on what he terms, in his characteristically blunt prose, the “lunatic fringe of slimy little anti-Semites who have styled themselves ‘Afrocentrists’” (10), even as he underscores, ironically enough, the crucial influence of the Jewish anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits on the development of Afrocentrism in the twentieth century. Scholars as different as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sterling Stuckey, for instance, were influenced by Herskovits, although they took his work in different directions (Gates with his ironically subversive Signifyin’ Monkey and Stuckey with his communally oriented Ring Shout).

But once Moses leaves behind the debates of the contemporary moment, the magnitude and ambition of his project become clear. Afrotopia is nothing less than an exploration of the wide range of approaches and perspectives that have developed within what could be called an Afrocentric black nationalism over an approximately 200-year period. A resistance to reification and a clear-eyed attention to “Varieties of Black Historicism,” as Moses titles one of his chapters, informs his analyses of the place of Africa in the writings of key African-American figures ranging from Prince Hall in the eighteenth century to scholarly and popular writers in the 1980s and 1990s. The book is not without its flaws, but in its restless resistance to the pieties and romanticizations that too often make their way into the study of black nationalism, Moses provides a model for how one might attend to the contradictions that have inevitably marked, and even helped to inspire, a number...