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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] To the topic of the thread, the current model of "Western" history is based on the imperial model of Greece and Rome. They were the first to introduce the concept of a "universal" history of all peoples and cultures into the lexicon of history. Before that, empires and cultures came and went but others, especially he victors, were not interested in documenting their history or achievements. And much of the Greek and Roman practice of documenting this 'universal' history was for the aim of promoting "Pax Universalis" as in peace and harmony of all the worlds cultures under the aegis of a single beneficent ruling empire. And this is exactly what colonialism and its economic justification, capitalism, seek in the world. Which means they have to create a narrative about world history where Eurasians aka "white" people have always been dominant in human affairs, to normalize European conquest and control. And in terms of anthropology that has been tied to creating a "universal" social, economic and cultural hierarchy based on skin color, with darker skin on the bottom. A good article on modern Pax Universalis is here: https://seekknowledgeeveninchina.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/pax-universalis/ Now, it is in that context that African Americans have been opposing and challenging the Eurocentric and white supremacist propaganda of history, long before such a thing as "Afrocentrism" even existed. Because the whole origin of racial anthropology started with the study of the ancient Nile where people like Samuel Morton and others were using cranial studies to "prove" ancient Nile Valley civilization was created by white caucasoids. Not to mention WMF Petrie also was promoting Eugenics arguments in his model of Nile Valley history in his various works, partly because one of his family members was a prominent Eugenicist. [QUOTE] Petrie's association with both of these men, and the exchange of ideas, materials and theories among them, was influential on his own practical and theoretical work on civilization, race, and culture. It was also important for the research Galton and Pearson were doing, since Petrie supplied them with needed human data and aided them in their statistical analyses. A brief examination of some of the anthropometric research published by the Eugenic Laboratories at UCL reveal that the faculty depended heavily upon Petrie to supply raw data in the form of human remains. It also establishes Petrie as a reliable source of statistical information and eugenic conclusions. Furthermore, the historical analysis of the development of civilization in Petrie's own works, such as Janus in Modern Life (1907) and The Revolutions of Civilisation (1911), demonstrate his adherence to a social evolutionary framework.[11] Petrie's social ideas were formed, not only by well-known works such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), but also, and even more so, by the statistical analysis and eugenic conclusions drawn from the anthropometric data he gathered with Galton and Pearson.[12] Like other social scientists at the time he presented and supported the evolutionary framework; he then went a step further by encouraging individuals to participate in social change through artificial selection, by choosing better mates.[/QUOTE] https://archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha.20103 So from the very beginning of anthropology and Egyptology there has been an inherent conflict about race and the colonial paradigm on which it was based. And this all came to a head in the 1960s when various black organizations began to protest on college campuses as part of the black power movement to retake control of the identity and history of "Negroes" in the United States and the world. This is what led to the creation of various black studies departments on university campuses to study and document African American and African history. And some of the most notable scholars of African history arrived on these universities in this era or just prior. Keep in mind however, that for the most part, African studies has always been dominated by European scholars. [QUOTE] Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.[/QUOTE][URL=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/herskovitsmustfall-a-meditation-on-whiteness-african-studies-and-the-unfinished-business-of-1968/160E96A986A2A6C23F86BE73E9277DA9]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/herskovitsmustfall-a-meditation-on-whiteness-african-studies-and-the-unfinished-business-of-1968/160E96A9 86A2A6C23F86BE73E9277DA9[/URL] [QUOTE] The African Studies Association (ASA) is a US-based association of scholars, students, practitioners, and institutions with an interest in the continent of Africa. Founded in 1957, the ASA is the leading organization of African Studies in North America, with a global membership of approximately 2000. The association's headquarters are at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The ASA holds annual conferences and virtual events for its members year-round. [b]As a result of racial and political disputes over exclusion from leadership positions of black academics and ASA leaders' ties with the US intelligence and military in the mid-twentieth century, the ASA split in 1968, when the Black Caucus of the ASA, led by John Henrik Clarke, founded the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA).[/b] The ASA is different from the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), which was founded at the University of Cape Town in October 1-2, 2012. [/QUOTE] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Studies_Association So the population of the ancient Nile Valley was always a flash point in the racial politics of the USA and by extension Europe. It was also a flash point Egypt as the European and especially British domination of Egypt and its antiquities, especially the discovery of King Tut's tomb, which occurred in the same year Egypt declared its independence from Britain. [QUOTE] The summer of 1923 gave newspaper readers a break from the press circus surrounding the tomb of Tutankhamun, the discovery of which just a few months earlier had grabbed the world’s attention. But an anonymous editorial in the Harlem-based weekly Negro World was suspicious of the sudden lull in what had been near constant coverage. The archaeologists must have clammed up for a reason, the editorial surmised, and that reason could only be race. If Tutankhamun proved to have skin the colour of ‘unbleached coal’, public interest would disappear, for ‘white Americans call nothing creditable Negroid if they can possibly find another name for it’.[/QUOTE] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/tutankhamun-flesh As a result of this historical racial politics in American academia, some African scholars began to form a new approach to African history called "Afrocentrism" or "Afrocentricity". The core idea being that Africans should have an African centered approach to history, culture, economics and society in order to recover some of their lost heritage and identity. It is also based around the idea of refuting this "white washing" of the past based no stereotypes of inferiority of Africans and people with black skin. And the core of that challenge lay in the fact that all human history starts in Africa and that for 200,000 years or more, humans were exclusively evolving in Africa and nowhere else. And it is because of that history of the African evolution of humanity that you get the civilization of the ancient Nile Valley. This also included documenting the legacy of ancient "black" (skinned) populations around the world who created civilizations before Europe, where they were challenging things like the Aryan Invasion theory of the Indus Valley. Because this entire system of historical propaganda was a global phenomenon and no part of the planet was immune to the this racist historiography. But it wasn't just African Americans who participated in this struggle as historically various Caribbean and African scholars also were involved such as Marcus Garvey and Cheik Anta Diop. Below is an example of what these African scholars were challenging which is the Eurocentric view of history that human evolution and advancement of culture and civilization started in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopedia_of_Universal_History [QUOTE] In the present work the color of the human body has been taken as the most invariable criterion of race character, and on that fundamental fact, assisted by other physical traits and by intellectual peculiarities of development, particularly by the great fact of language, the classification has been made. This has been done on the hypothesis of the general unity of mankind and the derivation of all the races from some common source localized in time and place. The character and method of classification chosen as the basis of the present treatise on the races of mankind will sufficiently appear in the chapter devoted to that topic. ... We shall begin with that which is clearly the most important division of mankind; that is, the Ruddy or White, Races. We shall see, first of all, the great Aryan Family parting from its central locality in Western Asia into its Eastern, or Asiatic, and its Western, or European, stem. These we shall endeavor to follow, considering in turn the ancient and modern Iranic races, and afterwards the Indie Aryans, from the time of their establishment in the Indus valley to their modern developments in the powerful races of Hindustan . Then in order we shall follow the Western division of the Indo-European family, noting its emergence in the Hellenic, the Italican, the Celtic, and the Teutonic races. This department of the work will bring tis into contact with the great classical nations of the ancient world. Since it includes essentially all the peoples of Europe, we shall here find those races in whom history has the most abiding interest. We must needs dwell long with the great Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Germans, and their descendent races in Europe and the West. The important Aryan family, however, is by no means coextensive with the White, or Ruddy, races of mankind. Of these te next general division is the Semitic family, second only in fame to the Indo-Europeans. We shall in proper order take up the ancient Semites and follow them from their earliest ethnic life in the valley of the Euphrates, through the great Aramaic and Hebraic developments, down to the modern Arabic evolution in Southwestern Asia. Afterwards the Hamites, of still narrower activities and race dispersion, will be considered, thus completing the cycle of the Ruddy division of mankind.[/QUOTE] https://archive.org/details/cyclopediauniver197274ridp/page/n47/mode/2up And generally, what has happened since the 1970s is that European racist dogma has become less overt in academic discourse owing to the end of legal racism in the United States and the independence of many former colonies world wide. But that does not mean the underlying mentality doesn't still exist, they just have suppressed many of its more overt characteristics. Therefore, the fundamental Eurocentric elements of that historiography still exist, as in the famous image of human evolution: [URL=https://www.alamy.com/infographic-of-the-evolution-of-the-hominids-from-the-australopithecus-5-million-years-ago-to-the-homo-sapiens-which-appeared-150000-years-ago-quarkxpress-qxp-adobe-indesign-indd-4960x3188-image525185248.html?imageid=B2B9D7E7-C58A-4C30-BFDA-A04CEF60F5E4&p=697458&pn=1&searchId=8ee6b5bc303613e84e43db5562f0956d&searchtype=0]https://www.alamy.com/infographic-of-the-evolution-of-the-hominids-from-the-australopithecus-5-million-years-ago-to-the-homo-sapiens-which-appeared-150000-years-ago-quarkxpress-qxp -adobe-indesign-indd-4960x3188-image525185248.html?imageid=B2B9D7E7-C58A-4C30-BFDA-A04CEF60F5E4&p=697458&pn=1&searchId=8ee6b5bc303613e84e43db5562f0956d&searchtype=0[/URL] Now all of that leads to the great cultural upheavals of the late 1980s and the early 1990s with the rise in awareness of Malcolm X in the black youth of the United States and the rise of various "Afrocentric" scholars like Dr John Henrike Clarke, Asa Hilliard, Runoko Rashidi, Ivan Van Sertima and others. And they were well known for being both scholars in various Universities but also in participating in numerous lectures around the country which were recorded and sold on VHS tapes at various black events and bookstores around the country. It is from this era that the term "Afrocentric" became identified with the argument over the ancient black Nile Valley and the effort to denigrate African scholars by stereotyping all their work as pseudo science and feel good history. But it wasn't only African scholars, as Martin Bernal, a European historian also caused a great uproar in the Eurocentric academy with his book "Black Athena". And this is when the word "Afrocentrism" became a "bad word" in European academic circles, namely because of much of the "underground" element of the discourse involving VHS tapes, photocopies of articles and other forms of information circulating in the community. And of course, this era also saw the rise of the Black Hebrew Israelites and other black street corner "conscious" movements like the 5 percent nation and other movements that were more social than actual scholarly, along with the resurgent popularity of the Nation of Islam. But at the end of the day, with or without those other elements, the attack has always been against Africans telling their own history and especially challenging the status quo of European dominated study of history, archaeology and anthropology. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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