Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, and: Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (review)

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, by Stephen Howe. London: Verso, 1998. x + 337 pp. ISBN 1-85984-873-7 cloth.

Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibility of American Intellectuals, by Jacques Berlinerblau. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. xii + 288 pp. ISBN 0-8135-2588-8 paper.

Martin Bernal, whose first volume of Black Athena appeared just as the American "culture wars" were developing, became associated with Afrocentric authors and their new-found media prominence, for many reasons extraneous to the strictly scholarly concerns of either. Similarly, the volumes under review are more closely related by their ultimate concern with intellectual responsibilities toward scholarly and lay audiences than by coverage of this nearly inextricably entangled, problematically "Afrocentric" subject matter.

Stephen Howe provides an impressively condensed overview of a broad range of social and intellectual influences that, with their particular interpretations of African history, have informed contemporary Afrocentric scholars. As his title suggests, he argues that these scholars are steeped in outmoded, primarily late-Victorian, ways of thinking about race, culture, and nationality, and that their works are neither up to the standards of responsible scholarly production nor relevant to contemporary African and African-American economic and political struggles. In fact, Howe's laundry list of accusations--cultural nationalism, authoritarianism, mysticism, essentialism, irrationalism, racism, obscurantism--unmasks a middle-class, idealist ideology that is not only irrelevant but actually harmful, explicitly subordinating economic concerns to a myth-laden project for building self-esteem, ultimately abetting the agenda of neoconservative politicians, who advocate individual behavior modifications as the solution to "endemic crises" in minority communities.

Jacques Berlinerblau's treatment of the imbrication of intellectual production with social ideologies is far more ambivalent and abstract. Berlinerblau examines the debates about Bernal's claims through a sociological lens, focusing particularly on the various rhetorical strategies employed by opposing participants. He also delineates what he claims is the first sociological critique of Black Athena itself, clarifying Bernal's rather inchoate "sociology of knowledge" through suggested improvements and revisions that would better support Bernal's argument, with which he is generally sympathetic. According to Berlinerblau, Bernal's "'total contestation' of the Western research university" (111), according to which the university's very structure is a heritage of some of the same nineteenth-century exclusionary impulses that Howe attributes to Afrocentrism, has been neglected. However, it is extremely important for understanding not only Bernal's account of the fortunes of the Ancient Model, but also the phenomenon of Bernal as "insider/outsider" (119) or heretic. For Berlinerblau, Bernal's accomplishment, beyond any of his claims about ancient history or modern intellectual history, is a contribution toward evaluating scholarly practice in the wake of the "culture wars," especially in the face of continuing structural changes in American universities that militate against reasoned discussion of unorthodox positions.

Each of these books is conceived, more explicitly in the case of Berlinerblau, as the work of a "public intellectual." Consequently, each contains an extensive bibliography for readers who may be stimulated to pursue their own questions. Each is also well-written in clear prose, nearly free of any jargon that would impede nonacademic readers--although Berlinerblau, discussing Bernal's sociological framework and his own justification for scholarly practice in the public sphere, addresses vexed questions of ideology (and Bourdieu's related notion of "doxa") in terms that, he notes, are probably unfamiliar and somewhat opaque (even "surreal"--191) to lay readers and to academics isolated by extreme disciplinarity from contact with developments in other areas of study.

Howe's book, summarizing a vast array of material in brief chapters, is a useful introduction to the rich legacy of diaspora writings on history and identity for anyone new to the field, but may be of less interest to specialists...