(book review) by Alexander H. Joffe.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Chicago Press
By RICHARD POE. Rocklin, California: Prima Publishing, 1997. Pp. xxii + 554 + 15 figs. $28.
Afrocentrism is a form of “ethno-nationalism” with deep roots in African-American and Afro-French traditions. Is it simultaneously a long overdue perspective on the place of Africa in the development of world civilizations, an indirect means for helping African-Americans contend with hegemonic Euro-American culture, and a direct assault on “Western” civilization, including rationalism and science. (1) Within the tradition there are any number of trends or variants, one of the most unusual being “Egyptocentrism.” Poe’s volume is, in many respects, a typical example of this latter genre.
Undoubtedly, it is tempting to read no further. But the subject of Afrocentrism will not simply go away, nor should it, since it captures much of what is wrong, and right, with both “Western” scholarship and its many critiques. Hysteria abounds on both sides of a yawning intellectual and social divide; how could it not? Afrocentrism kills and butchers sacred cows left and right. Sadly, the present volume does not contribute; it only further obfuscates.
This study is as breathless, lopsided, haphazard, and misinformed as can be imagined. Written in an excited, journalistic style, the book has a nonlinear structure. Unlike an academic presentation, it has a decided story arc. The rhetorical posture of the book stands explicitly against that of conventional scholarship, an enterprise that Poe regards as part of the problem and not the solution.
Poe is a unique contributor to Afrocentric literature in that he is white; unfortunately, he simply parrots scholars from that and parallel traditions, primarily Martin Bernal. (2) In terms of methodology, there is the typical conflation of history, archaeology, myth, and literature, all seamlessly and uncritically woven into a single narrative. Homer, Herodotus, Pausanias, the Parian marble, the Mit Rahina inscription, the Book of Enoch, and numerous other texts are read literally and harmonized effortlessly. There is also the typical paranoia, primarily about conspiracies to withhold knowledge (not unfounded concerns to African-Americans) and to deprive Africa of its glorious Egyptian past.
The plot is complex and involves a host of the usual suspects. In brief, the book suggests that Sesostris founded a colony in Colchis from which Europeans, hitherto headhunting, cannibalistic, wicker-man burning, blue-painted types, learned civilization. The story covers much familiar ground and many familiar faces.
The sphinx and the police artist Frank Domingo, Mark Lehner and John Anthony West, Count Volney, and Herodotus all make appearances early on. Later there are innumerable twists and turns, Karl Jung’s visit to Buffalo, the Nubian king Sesostris’s Twelfth Dynasty empire on the Black Sea, Michael Jackson’s Egyptian themed video, Frederick Douglass, the pre- Hispanic “city” of Cahokia, Daidalos, Kekrops (= Kheper-Ka-Re), Necco circumnagivating Africa, Thor Heyerdahl and Barry Fell, Ivan Van Sertima, Cyrus Gordon, Danaos establishing Egyptian colonies in Greece in 1511 B.C., cocaine mummies, Minyan kings and the Early Helladic pyramid at Amphion, the Master Race theory, Merlin, Arthur, the Qustul incense burner, Michael Crichton’s Harvard undergraduate thesis on Naqada skulls, and so on.