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African Culture; The Rhythms of Unity by Molefi Kete Asante; Kariamu Welsh AsanteReview by: David B. CoplanThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987), pp. 133-134Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/219302 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 133 BOOK REVIEWS 133

The analysis of ethnicity and its role in precolonial history occupies a minor place in this otherwise excellent collection of essays. Information may not have been available to the contributors, however, for a great deal of research remains to be done. More attention and reflection on that question during the precolonial period would have provided greater depth to subsequent chapters. In general, however, the editors and individual contributors are to be congratulated. The convergence of views and the relevance of their arguments enable the reader to appreciate better the nature and role of ethnic conflicts in struggles for power and political orientations of contemporary African states.

BUCYALIMWE MARARO Indiana University

AFRICAN CULTURE; THE RHYTHMS OF UNITY. Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, Number 81. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. x, 270. $35.00.

This new volume edited by the prominent Black American scholar Molefi Asante and his wife, African-American dance teacher and practitioner Kariamu Welsh Asante, provides a range of essays on the culture of Africa and the Black diaspora that is problematically diverse in subject matter, stance and quality. Uniting the contributors - Black scholars from Africa or the United States except for the Brazilian Abdias do Nascimento - is a commitment to the political stance and intellectual project of Cheikh Anta Diop, as represented in his African Origin of Civilization (1971) and Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1978). Though reluctant to say so publicly, many Western Africanists privately regard Diop's brand of pan-Africanist historical revisionism with derision or alarm. Yet his work has provided Black academics everywhere with an intellectual agenda and an ideology through which they can articulate their resentment of the African studies establishment and their demands for legitimacy within academia as a whole.

The renowned Africanists at large institutions who control African studies through the interlocking directorate of the funding agencies must not forget that a great many of the college courses on Africa are taught by Black teachers to Black students in departments less prestigious but essential to the life blood of our field. Diopism, the effort by Black academics to reappropriate African and Black diasporic studies through the rhetorically eulogistic and symbolic reconstitution of Africa's past, is a movement that cannot simply be dismissed by appeals to empirical rationalism or other "hegemonic" forms of methodological individualism. By and large, African and African-American scholars are still regarded as intellectual wards of the Western African studies tradition, and their frustration at having to play perpetual catch-up in the professional minor leagues simply must be addressed. The ghettoization of departments of Black and Hispanic studies (why, really, are these together?), expressed at the national level most recently in the effort by Black American scholars to break away from the African Studies Association, is not beneficial

The analysis of ethnicity and its role in precolonial history occupies a minor place in this otherwise excellent collection of essays. Information may not have been available to the contributors, however, for a great deal of research remains to be done. More attention and reflection on that question during the precolonial period would have provided greater depth to subsequent chapters. In general, however, the editors and individual contributors are to be congratulated. The convergence of views and the relevance of their arguments enable the reader to appreciate better the nature and role of ethnic conflicts in struggles for power and political orientations of contemporary African states.

BUCYALIMWE MARARO Indiana University

AFRICAN CULTURE; THE RHYTHMS OF UNITY. Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, Number 81. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. x, 270. $35.00.

This new volume edited by the prominent Black American scholar Molefi Asante and his wife, African-American dance teacher and practitioner Kariamu Welsh Asante, provides a range of essays on the culture of Africa and the Black diaspora that is problematically diverse in subject matter, stance and quality. Uniting the contributors - Black scholars from Africa or the United States except for the Brazilian Abdias do Nascimento - is a commitment to the political stance and intellectual project of Cheikh Anta Diop, as represented in his African Origin of Civilization (1971) and Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1978). Though reluctant to say so publicly, many Western Africanists privately regard Diop's brand of pan-Africanist historical revisionism with derision or alarm. Yet his work has provided Black academics everywhere with an intellectual agenda and an ideology through which they can articulate their resentment of the African studies establishment and their demands for legitimacy within academia as a whole.

The renowned Africanists at large institutions who control African studies through the interlocking directorate of the funding agencies must not forget that a great many of the college courses on Africa are taught by Black teachers to Black students in departments less prestigious but essential to the life blood of our field. Diopism, the effort by Black academics to reappropriate African and Black diasporic studies through the rhetorically eulogistic and symbolic reconstitution of Africa's past, is a movement that cannot simply be dismissed by appeals to empirical rationalism or other "hegemonic" forms of methodological individualism. By and large, African and African-American scholars are still regarded as intellectual wards of the Western African studies tradition, and their frustration at having to play perpetual catch-up in the professional minor leagues simply must be addressed. The ghettoization of departments of Black and Hispanic studies (why, really, are these together?), expressed at the national level most recently in the effort by Black American scholars to break away from the African Studies Association, is not beneficial

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 19:31:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

134 BOOK REVIEWS

for any of us. Relativistic dialogue, not mutual exclusivism and recrimination, is badly needed.

Scholars looking for an undergraduate textbook in Black studies will not be able to employ the Asantes' volume as a whole, since the levels of quality and complexity among the essays vary so markedly. Further, those whose curricula are "content-oriented" will find little in the way of empirical fact. The specifics of historical movement, cultural process, or ethnic and institutional traditions are largely bypassed in favor of universalizing experiences, values, and modes of expression. If you are looking for a book with a similar stance for teaching, you are still better off with Walter Rodney's How the West Underdeveloped Africa (1969).

Let me hurry to say, however, that even those who would not be pleased at the prospect of teaching Rodney may still find much of value in this collection. Wole Soyinka, Nigerian theatrical genius and gadfly of African cultural politics, writes brilliantly in response to the acrimonious, contradictory, and politically dogmatic debates which took place at the Conference of Ministers on African Culture (AFRICULT), held in Accra in 1975. His argument for the right of Black intellectuals to meet together as a self-identified collectivity to pronounce upon African culture is as well-reasoned, satirically incisive, and persuasive an essay on the intellectual dimensions of the pan-Africanist enterprise as one is likely to find. Let politicians of whatever ideological bent who believe that dedication to some more universalist cause gives them the right to tell African intellectuals with whom to meet or what to think beware their own colonizing tendencies.

Dorothy Pennington's essay, "Time in African Culture," is a cogently written introduction to the cultural relativity of time; specifically the perception, utility, and structuring of both experiential and historical time in Africa. Although she deals only anecdotally with time in specific societies, her generalized treatment is a thoughtful and persuasive summation of key concepts, of great potential value for undergraduate instruction. Eghosa Osagie's essay on "Socialism in the African Cultural Context" reexamines socialism as concept and practice in Africa, and argues eloquently for the reformulation of socialist programs to integrate more closely with the historical cultures and social institutions of sub-Saharan nations. John Henrik Clarke's contribution on "African-American Historians and the Reclaiming of African History" is a fine rhetorical excursion into Black diasporic historiography, and as instructional material makes a good companion piece to Richard Olaniyan's opening essay in his edited collection, African History and Culture (1982).

Finally, Molefi Asante's essay on "The African Essence in African- American Language" is a first-rate analysis of African linguistic influence on the English of the Americas. In the hands of a teacher knowledgable of the subject, Asante's work provides a superb introduction to the historical dynamics of trans- Atlantic culture processes. Historians and Black studies teachers should not be put off by the rhetorical and ideological excesses of some of the contributors to this volume, but should rather give some attention to its instructional value and to the importance of its overall concerns for the intellectual and institutional politics of our field.

DAVID B. COPLAN State University of New York College at Old Westbury

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