Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History

Wilson J. Moses's Afrotopia should be required reading for any cursory study of Afrocentrism and African American cultural mythology, intellectual thought and history. As someone who shares the author's sympathy with some Afrocentrists, Moses does an excellent job of placing various African-American (and white) black nationalists, Pan-Africanists, abolitionists, and intellectuals in a centuries-long development of history, anthropology, discourse of teleological history, and race. The Egyptocentrism of some brands of Afrocentrism, other forms of Afrocentrism (including the civilizationist model encapsulated by so much of black nationalist thought, examined in earlier works by Moses) and the competing historiography's of decline and progress as it relates to Afrocentrism and Black America's thoughts on its future and past are eloquently laid out for the reader. Moreover, as always with Moses, African-American writers are not confined to some intellectual ghetto of history but thoroughly integrated within larger debates and shifts in European and American disciplines. For instance, the alleged progressiveness of Booker T. Washington is compared to Dewey and Montessori, while the interests of the "New Negro" black intellectuals and their primitivism is tied with other notions of the decline of the West. Of course, one finds some retreading of old ground from previous works on black nationalism by the author, Moses more than adequately demolishes the rather misguided, insensitive and wrongheaded anti-Afrocentrist writings of Lefkowitz while simultaneously discussing the weaknesses and contradictions of Afrocentrists from Crummell to Diop.