Suchergebnisse

Building upon his previous work and using Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition as a model, Professor Moses has revised and brought together in this book essays that focus on the complexity of, and contradictions in, the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus M. Garvey. In doing so, he challenges both popular and scholarly conceptions of them as villains or heroes. In analyzing the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these five dominant personalities with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Professor Moses shows how they contributed to strategies for black improvement and puts them within the context of other currents of American thought, including Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism

Afrocentrism and its history has long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable. This is a rich history of black intellectual life and the concept of race

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Dedication -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Varieties of Black Historicism: Issues of Antimodernism and "Presentism -- Sentimental Afrocentrism -- Vindicationist and Contributionist Traditions -- Heroic Monumentalism: The Egyptocentric Mode -- A Grand Center of Negro Nationality -- African Redemptionism: The Hands of Ethiopia -- Romantic Racialism: Cult of African Moral Superiority -- African Diaspora and Culture Diffusion -- The Antimodernist Paradox: Modernism as Primitivism -- Afrocentrism and Mythic Truth -- Avoiding Presentism: Afrocentrism as a Response to Slavery and Segregation -- The Need for a Cultural Anchor -- Thematic Concerns of the Present Work -- 3 From Superman to Man: A Historiography of Decline -- 4 Progress, Providence, and Civilizationism: Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, and Others -- 5 W. E. B. Du Bois and Antimodernism -- Section 1: Arminianism, Antinomianism, and Africanity in Religion -- Section 2: Barbarism, Civilization, and Decadence -- Conclusion -- 6 Afrocentrism, Cosmopolitanism, and Cultural Literacy in the American Negro Academy -- 7 Caliban's Utopia: Modernism, Relativism, and Primitivism -- 8 Barbarism Grafted onto Decadence -- 9 Conclusion: Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia -- Notes -- Index