The Demise of the Inhuman: Afrocentricity, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Relevance of a Dialogue

xix RELEVANCE OF A DIALOGUE The concepts of liberty and democracy are absolutely central to modern political thought and practice, and they are also at the storm-center of much rethinking that has taken place over recent years. —Gary Browning, Abigail Halci, and Frank Webster, Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present The dialogue that follows between Westernity and Afrocentricity can be summarized as a debate between rational individualistic values and holistic ones. I think that this discourse operates in the realms of personal spaces, community, the world, and nature. To my knowledge, this is an enterprise that has rarely, if ever, been attempted, notwithstanding much criticism that every theory discussed here has endured per se; it is a rethinking of our contemporary human condition as much as of the discourses through which societies have moved toward an affluent first world of resources and abundance or pushed back as the so-called Other into the physical and intellectual starvation labeled as the third world. The particular locus of the research and examination for this book is American society, the American intellectual environment , and the American political and economic experience simply because the United States of America has been and remains xx Relevance of a Dialogue a place where a praxis of confrontation between European and African worldviews exists without parallel. In no other place in the world can we find such tremendous human devastation for such a long period of time at whose expenses another share of the human race could prosper and build a wealthy powerful nation. In no other place in the world can the two paradigms—Afrocentricity and Westernity—find a more accommodated milieu to operate and be understood. Moreover, it is in the United States and in the particular experience of African intellectuals and activists in America that Afrocentric theory has its roots, as well as in a deregulated American democracy that the neoliberal pattern of strong individualism and social inequalities is most blatant. It must not be forgotten that at the turn of the twentieth century W. E. B. Du Bois had already identified that the problem for American democracy was the problem of the color line, and unless it was confronted head on and resolved by white America, it could never be considered a democratic country (Du Bois, 1986). To this day, this is an unresolved problem that the election of an African American president does not simply overcome. Therefore, I choose a comparative analysis in order to highlight the most prominent problems that pose grave humanitarian challenges to a balanced survival of both human beings and the environment as well as the failures and successes of Western epistemological theories in order to address them in the light of the proposed responses offered by the Afrocentric paradigm on every form of inequality and oppression, be it race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious belief. The emergence of European modernism as a rejection of Victorian authority and the romantic tradition placed a strong emphasis on the autonomous “enlightened” individual and on his or her reasoning capabilities by whose exercise a linear progress of the so-called real world and the essence of Truth would be achieved (Pires, 2004). It was the expression or crystallization of modernity at the turn of the century and the response of the white supremacist intelligentsia to rescue the conceptual status quo that legitimized white privilege, intellectually, politically, socially, and economically based on hegemonic ideologies of racial superiority, scientific determinism, and rationality. Relevance of a Dialogue xxi With the uncertainty brought about by postmodern society, which carried a sense of fluidity of boundaries and a certain sense of pervasiveness that has impacted even in the area of theory, it seems as if we could just opt out of theory and still be able to make sense of the “real world” as we live it. Yet, however shaken on its rationalistic foundational grounds theories of the Enlightenment have been, everyday experiences are not abstract and so new paradigms emerged as approaches to understanding the world, an understanding that had been “undermined by empirical developments as well as intellectual critique” (Browning, Halci, and Webster, 2000: 4–5). Modernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, postmodernism , and postcolonialism are addressed in dialogue with Afrocentricity as part of the two-way relationship between theoretical understanding and practice that challenges established and hegemonic approaches to knowledge in the attempt to make sense of the world while navigating...