As the preceding chapters have shown, the assumption of European centrality in the human past is a pervasive feature of Western thought, resurfacing even where it is most loudly denounced. In recent years, of course, this worldview has come under sharp attack: not only as a symptom of cultural arrogance, but as a distortion of the empirical record. Samir Amin is one of many scholars to articulate a compelling critique of Eurocentrism on historical grounds. In positing a direct connection between ancient Greece and modern Europe, Amin argues, the doctrine mistakenly discounts important developments in the intervening millennia.1
We have argued that the time has come to mount a comparable critique on geographical grounds. For undergirding the creed of European priority in history is the mistaken notion that Europe constitutes a unique geographical unit, not only as a continent on a par with Asia or Africa, but as the first among the continents.2 The debate over the status of European civilization in the college curriculum has so far been hobbled by this pervasive misperception. In the frontal assault on the doctrine of Eurocentrism, as much as in the trenchant defense of the Western tradition, simplistic geographical notions continue to be deployed in unexamined ways. In fact, one corner of academia from which some of the sharpest attacks against Eurocentrism have been launched—namely, radical Afrocentrism—has also resurrected the worst fallacies of its ethnocentric logic. The main difference is that these discredited rhetorical tools are now being used to elevate a different landmass—and a long-denigrated one—to a position of geohistorical priority.
In noting this structural parallel between the metageographical frameworks of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, we do not by any means intend to suggest that these are in all ways parallel doctrines. Afrocentrism is an oppositional vision, formulated in reaction to a hegemonic worldview that has been profoundly dismissive of African culture and history. Moreover, while it has gained institutional backing on a few campuses, it enjoys nowhere near the same institutional force as its Eurocentric counterpart, nor has it played anything like the same historical role. If we nonetheless insist that this doctrine deserves critical scrutiny, it is because we take it seriously as an intellectual construct. While it may not share the widespread ideological power of Eurocentrism, radical Afrocentrism does make similar truth-claims, based on similarly faulty modes of geographical reasoning. An honest project of critical metageography must challenge such faulty reasoning in all its incarnations.
Reflecting their different institutional and intellectual histories, however, our discussions of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism follow very different paths. In the case of Eurocentrism, whose geographical logic has been critiqued at length in preceding chapters, we concentrate on surveying its residual institutional manifestations. After tracing briefly how the idea of European primacy has dominated in historical and geographical thought, we devote most of this section to exposing the residues of that idea in contemporary academic structures, course offerings, and textbooks. We also look briefly at the “inverted Eurocentrisms” of critical social theory, noting some ways in which the agenda of the cultural Left paradoxically perpetuates the predominance of Europe.
In contrast to this essentially institutional analysis of the Eurocentric mainstream, our treatment of radical Afrocentrism necessarily proceeds in a different way. Here we begin by limning the contours of a spatial imaginary developed in a handful of openly polemical texts. Our discussion focuses on two major variants of the Afrocentric world map: one that might be called a continental vision, ascribing an essentially African identity (and virtue) to all peoples who have resided in the space of the continent, and the other a more narrowly racialist variety, identifying Africanness (and virtue) exclusively with the continent’s black inhabitants. Having exposed the fallacies of continental thinking in a preceding chapter, we concentrate our present critique on the problems of racialist geography. In either form, we conclude, radical Afrocentrism is as unable to withstand sustained geohistorical scrutiny as is Eurocentrism. Whether based on geophysical or racialist criteria, and whether focused on Europe or Africa, the notion that one landmass holds special primacy in the history of the world simply does not hold up.
By the early 1800s, most Western historians had convinced themselves that only Europeans could really be said to possess history. The rest of the world was divided into two broad categories: a zone of Eastern despotism (Asia), which had once been progressive but was no longer so, and a realm of savagery and barbarism (sub-Saharan Africa, pre-Columbian America, Oceania), which had always been bereft of history. Asia’s allotted role in world history was thus that of a dim precursor; civilization may have begun there, but as social development had shown an inexorable tendency to move from east to west, the progressive center of the civilized world had firmly lodged itself on Eurasia’s western margin.3
The notion that the dynamic center of human history had migrated westward over the years, following the course of the sun, has a long history in European thought. Loren Baritz traces this idea to Virgil and other Roman poets who saw the torch of civilization passing westward from Troy to Rome; Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt links it to Orosius, the author of the first Christian world history.4 In the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth extended the same movement from Rome to England, and by the eighteenth century several writers were already looking to extend it yet again across the Atlantic.5 But it was Hegel who gave the idea philosophical respectability, stating categorically that “the history of the World travels from East to West.” According to Hegel, sub-Saharan Africa had no part in world history, being “still in the condition of mere nature.” Asia, on the other hand, was an area in which “spirit [had] not yet attained subjectivity” and lived “only in an outward movement [of history] which becomes in the end an elemental fury and desolation.”6
The nineteenth-century German geographer Carl Ritter took up this idea, contending that “Europe may be called the Face of the Old World, out of which the soul of humanity could look more clearly into the great and promising future.”7 But it was the noted American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, writing in 1911, who gave this metageographical fiction its most elaborate (and lyrical) expression. “The Atlantic face of the Americas,” she wrote, formed “the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity—dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceania and the Malay archipelago, to permanent state making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe.”8 Not surprisingly, this great American scholar went on to suggest that the locus of history was continuing its westward push—back to Atlantic America.
Hegel’s spatial vision of history was tremendously influential through the mid–twentieth century. (Indeed, its continuing influence today is reflected in the extraordinary popularity of Francis Fukuyama’s Hegelian meditation, The End of History and the Last Man.)9 But Hegel was by no means the only philosopher to locate the spirit of history exclusively in Europe. Consider, for example, Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose views on this subject presented in many respects a distinct alternative to those of Hegel. Herder has recently been praised for recognizing “that it was the ‘civilized’ European’s illusion that he was at the center of things.”10 Yet on geographical grounds, the similarity in their conceptions is significant. While concurring with Hegel that Asia was originally “the mother of all mental illumination,” Herder insisted that “the Philosophy of History looks upon Greece as her birthplace.” The reason: Asia long ago fell into a stupor by imbibing too much “tradition,” a “pleasant poison” and the “true narcotic of the mind.”11
These brief passages, while implicating both Herder and Hegel for limiting “true” history to Europe, also suggest that both men believed Asiatic societies were at least worthy of study. Such was not necessarily the case several decades later. By the mid–nineteenth century, Eurocentrism had so intensified that it was common for world historians simply to brush away the rest of the world in a few opening passages. A typical “outline of universal history,” written in German and published in translation in the United States in 1853, opened by dismissing Eastern civilization in no uncertain terms: “By dint of their intellectual capacity [the Asiatics] quickly attained to a certain grade of civilization, but afterwards gave themselves up to an unenterprising pursuit of pleasure, until they gradually sank into sloth and effeminacy.” The brief discussion of Asian history that followed began by repeating the now familiar Hegelian trope: “As the progress of the human race has in general followed the course of the sun, it will be most advisable to commence its history with the tribes of the extreme East. In the vast empire of China has lived, since the earliest period, a race of Mongolian origin, which has preserved unchanged for years the same culture and institutions.”12
In keeping with these uncharitable views, the author dispensed with Chinese history in a single page. India, which was deemed somewhat more important (both because of its more westerly location, and by virtue of being peopled by an “Indo-European race”), merited all of two and a half pages. After a few more pages of text were given over to the “Near East,” the remainder of this “universal” history was devoted to Europe.
By the early twentieth century, the equation of world history with European history had become normative in Western scholarship. Even those who questioned the direction of Western development did so within this framework. Karl Marx may have inverted Hegel’s idealism, but he never fundamentally questioned Hegel’s geographical vision of history—leading Samir Amin a century later to lament that Eurocentrism had become the bane of Western socialism.13 Those influenced by Saint-Simon saw the world in a similar light, and August Comte especially “was a convinced, almost mystical, champion of européocentrisme who believed that “Europe was in the end to become identical with humanity.”14 Leopold von Ranke, in some ways the antithesis of Hegel as a historian,15 nonetheless joined Hegel in celebrating European genius and world domination.16 Jacob Burckhardt likewise viewed the universal as reducible to the European.17
That nineteenth-century European historians would equate their small corner of Eurasia with the universe is not particularly surprising.18 More remarkable is the extent to which this practice has persisted into the present century.19 Will Durant opened the popular Story of Civilization with a trenchant criticism of conventional historiographic practice on this point: “[T]he provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no mere academic error, but possibly a fatal failure of perspective and intelligence. The future faces into the Pacific, and understanding must follow it there.”20 Yet even Durant proceeded to dispense with Asia in a single volume (under the telling rubric of Our Oriental Heritage), allotting virtually all space in the remaining ten volumes of the Story of Civilization to Europe. (In keeping with historical convention, the Middle East and North Africa were later reintroduced for their role as a repository of the “Western tradition” while Europe slumbered through the early Middle Ages.)
To be sure, a handful of renowned world historians of the early and middle twentieth century—notably H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, and William McNeill—endeavored to transcend European parochialism. But most textbooks and popular works have stubbornly held to an older vision of European primacy. A book with the sweeping title A History of the Modern World, published for student use by Alfred Knopf in 1971, considers the non-Western portions of the world only to the extent that they were dominated by Europe.21 A more recent work, purporting to elucidate the “mainstream of civilization,” takes a more catholic approach and does examine Asia in its own right, yet maintains it in a distinctly subordinate position.22 Here “ancient India and China” are rushed through in one combined chapter, while the Roman Empire is given three chapters of its own; for the medieval period, the Latin portion of Europe rates six chapters, while the realm of Islam is combined with the Byzantine Empire(!), the two being discussed in a scant one and a half chapters. If this is the mainstream of civilization, Asia would appear to have been watered by a meager trickle, while sub-Saharan Africa has evidently been a parched wasteland.
Certainly strenuous efforts are now under way to correct the European bias of world history texts. Most significant here is the recently issued National Standards for World History.23 Yet it is notable that this document has prompted a howl of outrage from politically powerful conservatives, even though it still retains a certain emphasis on the Western world.
The pervasive provincialism of world history texts is replicated in university course offerings. Although the critiques recently launched against academic Eurocentrism have again resulted in some initial reform efforts, the curriculum as a whole remains overwhelmingly concerned with Europe and North America. Fields such as philosophy, politics, sociology, religion, art history, and music by and large retain their traditional love affair with the products of Western civilization. While some required introductory humanities classes have recently been re-framed in a more cosmopolitan spirit, upper-level courses have been little affected. In some philosophy departments, for example, an occasional course might be offered under the dubious heading of “Asian philosophy,” but most departments remain exclusively concerned with the European tradition.
History tends to do a better job than most disciplines of representing humanity’s ecumenical heritage. Major American history departments are committed to covering the entire earth, or at least those portions of it possessing a literary tradition. Modern history in particular is typically understood as a global category, and all reputable departments acknowledge at some level the importance of premodern Asian history. Yet the bias toward Europe and the United States persists. Most history faculties informally divide themselves into three clusters: those scholars concerned with the United States, those whose focus is Europe, and those who work in “the rest of the world.” Not untypically the first group is most numerous and most powerful, while the third group is the least numerous and the least powerful. As a result, while Asia is not ignored altogether, it is often accorded so few faculty positions that large portions of Eurasia slip off the map altogether.
This particular manifestation of Eurocentric bias is clearly revealed in the course catalogs of North America’s major universities, circa 1990.24 Stanford University, for example, listed thirteen history classes on Europe as a whole, with another nineteen on specific European countries or regions (four each on the British Isles and France, three on Germany, seven on Russia, one on Italy, and four on eastern Europe). East Asia was relatively well represented with thirteen courses (six on China, five on Japan, and two on Korea), but South Asia was represented by only a single course, and Southeast Asia did not make the roster at all. Stanford’s emphasis on Europe in its history offerings was even more pronounced when one included the classics department; as in other schools, “classics” refers to Europe, with a slight nod to the “Near East.” (Classical China and Meso-america, for instance, are never recognized under this rubric.) Nor was Stanford at all atypical. Harvard’s history department offered over fifty courses on Europe, in contrast to less than ten for all of East, South, and Southeast Asia. Columbia included as many history courses on Iberia as it did on all of South and Southeast Asia combined. Cornell was unusual in providing four courses on South Asia, yet these offerings were overshadowed by eleven classes on Britain and thirty-nine on Europe as a whole. Chicago’s history department offered as many courses on France alone as it did on all of East and Southeast Asia.
The Eurocentric bias in the university history curriculum is balanced somewhat by historically oriented courses on the non-Western world that are offered in separate regional studies departments and programs. Harvard’s history department may have ignored South Asia, for instance, but the university offered two courses each on the histories of India and Tibet through its program in Sanskritic and Indian Studies. Similarly, Cornell skipped Southwest Asia and North Africa in its history department, only to cover both in its Near Eastern Studies program. Regional studies centers of this kind offer undeniable advantages for American scholars focusing on understudied areas of the globe. But to segregate Asian history into separate programs in this way also reinforces the worldview of Eurocentrism. The implicit message is that while places like India may have civilizations, they do not really possess history (in the sense of a dynamic, self-generated transformational force). Responsible scholars have actively rejected such claims for decades. Yet the notion that only the West has history lives on at the heart of the American intellectual enterprise, encoded into the very structure of academic disciplines.
Universities do not necessarily organize their history offerings in this way because of active ideological Eurocentrism on the part of the faculty. More often, departmental structures reflect the inertia of their institutional setting. Departments of East Asian or Near Eastern Studies were created in the heyday of Orientalism, when scholarly consensus did regard Asian societies as largely ahistorical. Once established, they acquired a life of their own. Perhaps as a result, challenges to such deep-seated organizational structures are rare, even among the most ardent critics of academic Eurocentrism. Instead the emphasis is typically put on calls for additional classes, for the creation of centers devoted to the study of Asian-, Hispanic-, or African-American culture, and for the strengthening of area studies faculties.
The perpetuation of archaic institutional categories may indeed seem innocuous. What does it matter where non-European history is taught, it might be asked, so long as it is available somewhere on campus? But the continued isolation of college courses on China in a department of East Asian Studies, or of those on Iran in a department of Near Eastern Studies, has consequences for scholarship as well as for pedagogy. Such institutional arrangements remove scholars of these areas from the diverse intellectual milieus of traditional disciplines and instead segregate them into what can become regional ghettos. Can this be unrelated to the frequently heard complaint that Asian Studies tends to lag behind explorations of Western history in the development of theoretical perspectives? Certainly other factors contribute to marginalizing Asia in the scholarly imagination as well, not least the daunting effort required to conduct research in non-Western-language materials. Such an intrinsic problem is perhaps exacerbated, however, by pulling scholars outside of a disciplinary community and clustering them instead in marginalized area-studies complexes. At the very least, such institutional arrangements would seem to deserve more serious scholarly scrutiny than they typically receive.
At one level, the priority given to Europe and especially the United States in most American universities reflects a thoroughly understandable interest in local conditions. The educational system of every country in the world endeavors to teach students about their own society; history as taught in Tokyo is Japanocentric, just as that offered in Riga is Latviacentric.25 It is only to be expected that American history should take primacy in American schools, and since most Americans institutions do have European roots, a major focus on Europe is to be expected as well. Nor is it our intent to disparage national and local history. Learning about one’s own society and its past is an essential foundation for responsible citizenship. But in the drive to understand the lineaments of American society, vast areas of the world have largely been neglected. National and local history cannot be taught accurately, nor can they serve their proper function, except when set in the context of a global and thoroughly ecumenical approach. It is this balance that we believe is lacking in American educational institutions today. Unfortunately, student demand contributes to this imbalance in the curriculum. Where existing courses on African or South Asian history do not fill, it is unlikely that extra efforts will be made to hire additional Africanists or South Asianists.
Perhaps the primary justification for continuing to slight the history of the non-Western world is that historians have traditionally sought out the “main lines” of development, concentrating their attention on a handful of places that have proven themselves to be important centers of innovation and power. Even within Europe, this has meant a heavy focus on a small set of countries: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy (the latter highlighted mainly for its role in the Renaissance). The rest of Europe has usually been viewed as marginal and is consequently marginalized. Similarly, in American history the regional history of the South and the West has at best been accorded a second-rate status. The “mainstream” of American history is either located at the national level or in the Northeast.
Such a view of history does offer certain advantages, but it is also significantly limiting, and it risks impoverishing our understanding of the world. To suggest that one area’s history is vastly more important than that of the rest of the world, as our current curriculum does, is to lull students into a dangerous form of parochialism. Quite aside from the moral questionability of deeming certain places unworthy of study because they have not been globally dominant in the past, this view of history raises practical problems of second-guessing the future as well. To take one striking example, before World War II Japan was often viewed as an intriguing but rather marginal place, and only a handful of Americans possessed linguistic competence in Japanese. Today, by contrast, Japan is recognized as a historically significant nation indeed, and American universities are in hot competition for qualified Japan specialists. Clearly, past power is not necessarily a reliable guide to future importance. To map out zones of historical significance and insignificance is to presume knowledge of the unknowable.
The geographer’s perspective may offer a useful corrective here. Unlike historians, geographers have traditionally been concerned with landscapes as witnesses to the diversity and variability of human experience. Rather than ranking countries according to their historical importance, they have tended to explore and celebrate whatever distinguishes one place from another.26 Indeed, it is the very uniqueness of a place that has most often caught the geographer’s fancy. The result is at best a sort of cartographic democracy, where all portions of the earth are viewed as equally interesting because each has its own combination of characteristics.27 The geographical imagination may be stunted in other respects, but this fundamentally balanced perspective on place offers an important contribution toward a truly global, ecumenical study of our species and its place on the planet.
If the geographical imagination offers a potential avenue of escape from Eurocentrism, however, geography as a field has hardly been immune from the syndrome.28 On the contrary, geography perhaps more clearly than any other discipline testifies to the failure of recent theoretical reorientations to offer any real alternatives to the Eurocentric approaches of the past. Not a few practitioners of the more avant-garde schools of geography actually argue for overthrowing the field’s long-standing commitment to global understanding in favor of a renewed focus on the West.
The clearest sign of a retreat from cosmopolitanism in geography is the steady decline in overseas field research.29 The turning away from work in non-Western settings began in the 1950s and 1960s, when young scholars sought to transform geography into a universalistic spatial science.30 As long as “laws” discovered in Iowa had explanatory power as well for the landscapes of Nigeria, it was only logical to conduct research close to home.31 The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of several competing theoretical orientations in the discipline that reasserted the importance of local particularities. Yet in all of these movements—especially in geographical humanism—research efforts remained largely focused on Western societies.32
Nowhere is the retreat from international topics more clearly evident than in regional and cultural geography, the two subdisciplines previously devoted to a globalist approach. In the new regional geography, attention is typically focused either on Anglo-American regions or on the spaceless, placeless, regionless flux that is said to characterize the postmodern condition.33 Most practitioners of the “new cultural geography,” meanwhile, are primarily concerned with urban settings in the English-speaking world, seeking either to explicate the locational structures of distinct cultural (or subcultural) groupings, or to explore ideological reflections found in the modern urban landscape.34 There is nothing wrong with such studies in their own right. What is troubling is the accompanying dismissal of “old” cultural geography—the kind that entails fieldwork in remote and often rural areas—as “a celebration of the parochial” and a “contemplation of the bizarre.”35 Such dismissals imply that certain places (especially postmodern cities like Los Angeles)36 are fundamentally more important than others, and that the particularities of remote or distinctive landscapes may be regarded as somehow trivial. For those attempting to forge a globalist perspective, such disciplinary trends offer little comfort.
As we have seen, Eurocentric thinking has been so ubiquitous that no field of study has been able to avoid it completely. In the same way, a world vision that places Europe at the center of analysis informs the works of numerous scholars all along the continuum of political beliefs. Even many writers who claim to be making bold breaks from Eurocentrism often continue unwittingly to lend support to key elements of the doctrine.
Neo-Marxist writing, in such fields as world-systems and dependency theory, asserts the centrality of the West in explicitly spatial terms, labeling Europe and North America (and sometimes Japan as well) as the global core. Such analyses take an important step away from traditional Eurocentrism by historicizing this structure, arguing that the primacy of the core stems more from its exploitation of the rest of the world than from its intrinsic progressiveness. But there remain inherent problems in the spatial model of core and periphery. “Africans and Asians,” writes the perceptive C. A. Bayly, “are again in danger of dropping out of the picture, while terms like ‘peripheral’ and ‘semi-peripheral zones’ have replaced the evocative ‘Dark Continents’ of the Victorians in contemporary debate.”37
Newer voices in the academic Left denounce Eurocentrism in all forms, hidden as well as overt. The vanguard of this movement consists of scholars associated with postmodern theoretical approaches. By adopting a relativistic viewpoint that stresses diversity of experience and multiplicity of meaning, such critics hope to demolish the monolithic ideological structures of the past. The more extreme postmodernists go further, questioning whether human communities around the globe share any basic cognitive and experiential ground. To the extent that each group is believed to have its own reality—one that is largely inaccessible to outsiders—an authentic interpretation can come only from within the cultural context in question. In this view, the very process of studying other peoples is suspect. In presuming to speak for and about foreign peoples, the Western observer can cast them only into the role of an objectified, voiceless “Other.” The triumph of such a scientistic (and masculine) mode of seeing (or “gaze”)—i.e., the continuing value placed on knowledge gained through invasive scrutiny by expert outsiders—is widely denounced today as a pernicious legacy of imperialism.38
This perspective offers powerful tools for analyzing the intellectual discourses and colonial mentalities that have long sustained Eurocentrism.39 But it also has troubling implications for scholarly practice. As Samir Amin points out, to claim “that only Europeans can understand Europe, Chinese China, Christians Christianity, and Moslems Islam” is effectively to surrender to an ethnocentric world, where “the Eurocentrism of one group is completed by the inverted Eurocentrism of others.”40
Within the United States, perhaps the most prominent example of the “inverted Eurocentrism” that Amin laments is to be found in radical Afrocentrism.41 Afrocentrism is a diverse philosophy, but the core concern of most theorists is to illustrate the profound creativity, civility, and historicity of African peoples.42 Particular attention is paid to ancient Egypt, which is seen both as having been fundamentally African (in cultural attributes as well as racial affiliation) and as having been the ultimate font of Mediterranean civilization.
The evidence presented to substantiate this view is sometimes compelling. Many ancient Egyptians—elites and commoners alike—might well be identified by today’s criteria as black Africans rather than as Caucasians or as members of any putative Mediterranean race.43 Moreover, Egyptian influences were of some importance in the development of Greek culture—a relationship recognized by the ancient Greeks themselves and not denied in Europe until the romantic reaction of the nineteenth century focused scholarly attention on overtly racist doctrines.44 In stark contrast to modern times, the “racial” attributes of different peoples were evidently rarely considered significant in the classical era and were seldom employed as a measure of civilization.45
This argument is forcefully advanced by Martin Bernal, author of the widely cited book Black Athena. Bernal acknowledges the polemical nature of his work, contending that the “political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.”46 Nonetheless, Black Athena is probably the most deeply researched contribution to the “African origins of civilization” school. Its first volume in particular represents a substantial, if controversial, intellectual achievement. Here Bernal offers a major new reading, not only of ancient civilization but of modern intellectual history as well. Particularly compelling is the way he documents the origins in nineteenth-century Germany of the now-conventional myth that ancient Greek culture was formed de novo, in contrast to an earlier understanding that Greece owed much to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean civilizations.
Supported by a variety of evidence and possessing a profound moral authority, the critique of Eurocentrism articulated in Black Athena and elsewhere in the Afrocentric corpus is both pointed and persuasive. But some proponents of Afrocentrism, including Bernal, go beyond rejecting the notion of Western priority to make untenable claims on behalf of Africa, upholding it as the unique locus of innovation or virtue. In so doing, radical Afrocentrists embrace the same faulty geographical thinking they so effectively expose. While cutting Europe down to size constitutes an essential metageographical advance, substituting Africa for Europe in a revised ethnocentric scheme merely perpetuates the myth of continents in a new guise.
“Africa,” however, does not always denote the same thing in this literature. Molefi Asante, representing one camp, insists that African culture is coterminous with the conventionally defined continent. Along with Mark Mattson, Asante straightforwardly contends that peoples throughout the continent share essential cultural traits: “There is an African culture, just as one might speak of an Asian or a European culture.”47 He accordingly finds the term sub-Saharan suspect.48 North African peoples, he insists, are just as African as those who happen to reside south of the great desert. Even groups who migrated to north Africa from other continents in historical times—the Carthaginians no less than the Arabs—should be considered part of the same cultural sphere as sub-Saharan groups like the Yoruba or the Xhosa. In Asante’s view, such famous Arabic writers as Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta demonstrate the superior qualities of a distinctly African civilization.49
In contrast to scholarly claims concerning the importance of ancient Egypt, this sweeping assertion of pan-African similarities flies in the face of historical evidence. While northern Africa in the prehistorical and earliest historical eras may indeed have been culturally linked to the sub-Saharan zone,50 such relationships had deteriorated by Roman times. After the Arab migrations, which began in the seventh century, the notion of a fundamental unity of northern and sub-Saharan Africa cannot be seriously maintained. Even the notion of a unified sub-Saharan cultural zone is difficult to substantiate; linkages between western Africa and southern Africa were at most vague and indirect, while highland Ethiopia, the Khoisan-speaking areas of the southwest, and Madagascar are perhaps best separated from the sub-Saharan zone altogether. Several portions of sub-Saharan Africa were also closely connected to other portions of the world: the eastern littoral, for example, to Oman and the rest of southern Arabia, and highland Ethiopia to Yemen in earlier millennia and to India in more recent centuries. And while one might agree with Patrick Manning that the modern slave trade in some ways created “one Africa out of many,”51 one would still have to limit this latter-day unified Africa to the area south of the Sahara.
There is also irony in Asante’s sanctification of Arabic writers such as Ibn Khaldun as exemplars of uniquely African sensibilities. Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian of Andalusian descent, was undoubtedly one of the greatest historical philosophers of all time. But he was also heir to a tradition of bigotry toward sub-Saharan Africa, albeit one based on cultural and environmental, rather than racial, reasoning.52 Peoples living in the southern climatic zones, he unabashedly wrote, have “qualities of character [that are] close to those of dumb animals.”53 He further argued, in true environmental determinist fashion, that the “stupidity,” “levity,” and “emotionalism” of black Africans was the result of climatic influences.54 To be sure, his view of northeastern Europeans was just as dismissive: “It has even been reported that most of the Negroes of the first zone dwell in caves and thickets, eat herbs, live in savage isolation and do not congregate, and eat each other. The same applies to the Slavs. The reason for this is that their remoteness from being temperate produces in them a disposition and character similar to those of dumb animals.”55
Ibn Battuta, another prominent scholar from the Maghreb, entertained similarly disparaging ideas. This fourteenth-century geographer was probably the world’s greatest premodern traveler, but he was not at all impressed by the sub-Saharan kingdom of Mali. The many un-Islamic practices of Mali’s residents appalled him (as did the stinginess of its sovereign).56 To say that Ibn Battuta was more at home in Arabia than in Mali would be an understatement of the highest order. Like Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta ill suits the role of pan-African cultural hero.
For these and related reasons, a separate strain of Afrocentric theory challenges Asante’s notion that North Africa’s Arabic and Berber speakers should be considered carriers of a distinctly African tradition. Opuko Agyeman, for example, views Arabs as historical enemies of the African people and disparages Islam as a devastating foreign religion. “Afrocentricity,” Agyeman argues, refers “exclusively to the Africa of the Africans, of black people, and decidedly not to any continental mystique of a geographical area which includes Africa’s invaders—whether they be Arabs who set foot a thousand years ago, or the Dutch who made their incursion some five hundred years ago.”57 But while he rejects the notion that the continent imparts some kind of mystical bond to all who dwell in Africa, Agyeman does identify precisely such a primordial glue in race. Moreover, he goes on to claim: “The other side of this medal of racial consanguinity—of the corporate essence of the racial family—is the concept of the indivisibility of [black] African destiny.”58
The racial essentialism evident in Agyeman’s writing is widespread in extremist Afrocentric thought (despite Asante’s protestations that “the concept of race has no biological or anthropological basis”).59 To the racial essentialist, races constitute discrete subspecies of Homo sapiens and are characterized by inherently different modes of life and patterns of thinking. One is black or white not merely in skin tone, but in one’s very essence. Moreover, central to this version of racial essentialism is a belief in fundamental geographical concordance: a belief, in other words, that a wide variety of different features will automatically have identical geographical distributional patterns. Agyeman, for example, implicitly posits the existence of a basic divisional line across the southern Sahara: to the north of this line, one finds white peoples and non-African ways of thinking; to the south, one finds the black race and African ways of thinking.
The logical linkage between region and race is supplied by environmental determinism. This kind of thinking looms everywhere behind doctrinaire Afrocentrism, but it is articulated most clearly in the work of the movement’s founder, Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop argues for the existence of two fundamental races, the black and the white, each associated with a distinct portion of the earth, the South and the North.60 Each of these human subspecies, in turn, owes its fundamental character to the environment in which it developed. The black race, encompassing both Africans and other southern peoples (such as the Dravidians of India), originated in a realm of abundance and agricultural productivity, which engendered “a gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature, endowed with a spirit of justice and gaiety.”61 The environmental determinants of the white race, however, were of a different order: “[T]he ferocity of nature in the Eurasian steppes, the barrenness of those regions, the overall circumstances of the material conditions, were to create instincts necessary for survival in such an environment. . . . In the unrewarding activity that the physical environment imposed on man, there was already implied materialism, anthropomorphism, . . . and the secular spirit. . . . Man in those regions long remained a nomad. He was cruel.”62
Nor is Diop alone in these beliefs. Judging from recent publications, it would appear that the linkage of race, place, and personality has numerous supporters. Clinton Jean, author of a recent book called Behind the Eurocentric Veils, echoes Diop’s climatic determinism in explaining why, unlike the Eurasians, African peoples are inherently peaceful, humanistic, and nonsexist.63 On their way to discovering agriculture and inventing civilization, Jean tells us, Africans evolved for millennia in a state of bliss, which was only disrupted when violent barbarians invaded from the Eurasian outback.64 This vision of global history is almost identical to that of early-twentieth-century European and American racists. The narrative is the same; only the moral signs have been reversed.65
Strikingly, the most prominent proponent of African racial cum geographical essentialism is Martin Bernal, whose Black Athena was singled out for praise above. In the more abstruse second volume of this work, where he lays out the archaeological and philological evidence for his thesis, Bernal adopts a strikingly reactionary posture, embracing both racial essentialism and environmental determinism with an enthusiasm rarely seen in American social science since the 1920s. On the former score, Bernal occasionally approaches absurdity, as in his convoluted explanation of an exiguous modern black population in Abkhazia (part of [former Soviet] Georgia).66 The book’s claims about climate and culture also take some bizarre turns, including two instances where specific ideological and artistic developments are explained as responses to volcanic eruptions.67 It is his more mundane evocations of environmental determinism, however, that do the most harm to the book’s credibility.68
Besides evoking an environmental determinism that would make most geographers blush, Bernal also forwards an extreme form of cultural diffusionism, implicitly denying that “uncivilized” peoples had any creativity by tracing all progress to one or two cultural hearths. The notion that “civilization” had a single, racially determined point of origin—from which it spread out to enlighten the rest of the world—was widespread a century ago, embraced not only by white racists, but by certain Hindu chauvinists in India.69 In particular, Western scholars were inclined for many years to attribute anything laudable in sub-Saharan Africa to southward diffusion from Egypt.70 Bernal retains this vision, with the single (if signal) difference that he reorients the arrows from south to north.
The problem of substituting one chauvinism for another in this way has not gone unrecognized in African studies. As V. Y. Mudimbe cogently writes: “Modern African thought . . . is at the crossroads of Western epistemological filiation and African ethnocentrism. Moreover, many concepts and categories underpinning this ethnocentrism are inventions of the West.”71
Bernal himself admits as much, in a backhanded way. He concludes the second volume of Black Athena by acknowledging its “outrageous” character, noting that many of its outrages stem from a revival of scholarly beliefs that have been dismissed since the early twentieth century.72 In our view, those beliefs were dismissed for good reason. If researchers in the last sixty years have abandoned geographical determinism and strict diffusionism, it is because their premises have been thoroughly discredited.
So, too, with the basic categories of racialist discourse. As noted above, race has always been an inescapably geographical concept. In earlier years, many scholars assumed a simple continental correspondence, associating each landmass with a discrete race readily identifiable by skin color. While this model was abandoned long ago as both geographically and biologically unsupportable, the general notion of correspondence persisted. In theory, different races have always been tied, at least in their origins, to distinct areas of the world.
It does not require an especially discerning eye to realize that there is nothing red about indigenous Americans or yellow about East Asians73—or that blacks are not really black and whites are far from white.74 Accordingly, in the heyday of “racial science” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western scholars devised ever more elaborate racial classificatory schemes—and drew correspondingly intricate maps to show their distributional patterns.75 While the ideological underpinnings of this endeavor began to be rejected in the United States after the 1930s,76 scholars of race continued to readjust their grand taxonomies through the 1960s.
A major impulse behind this project was to enlarge the realm of the “Caucasian race,” largely at the expense of the “Negro race” in northeastern Africa. Such a gambit actually dates back to the late nineteenth century, following Ethiopia’s defeat of an invading Italian army. “Since racism did not permit Westerners to acknowledge that black men could vanquish whites, Europeans suddenly discovered that Ethiopians were Caucasians darkened by exposure to the equatorial sun.”77 St. Clair Drake nicely illustrates the ironic aspects of this maneuver: “As late as the sixties, in some areas of the [United States] a person was considered ‘black’ by law or custom if he had, or was suspected as having, any African ancestry, however remote and small in degree. At the same time, in dealing with Africa some anthropologists refused to classify any Africans as ‘Negro’ or ‘black’ if they were known to have, or were assumed to have, any white Caucasoid ancestry! They were dubbed ‘Hamites,’ not ‘true Negroes.’ ”78
The residue of the “Hamitic thesis” remains in contemporary maps of racial distribution, which often persist in classifying the residents of Ethiopia as Caucasians. (One geography textbook published in 1990 actually extends the realm of Europeans as far as eastern Kenya!)79 The most egregious example of such cartographic arrogance can be seen in a world atlas devised by scholars in the U.S. War Department in 1946, which extends the “white race” to encompass all of Uganda as well as the northeastern section of Zaire. This same map, incidentally, portrays Hungary and most of Finland as occupied by members of the “yellow” race—presumably by virtue of the fact that Hungarians and Finns speak Uralic, rather than Indo-European, languages.80 This is by no means the only occasion on which race has been conflated with language, but rarely has the exercise yielded such counterintuitive categorizations.
In attempting to depict the complexities of racial affiliation that they believed they were discovering, physical anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s delineated some rather bizarre distributional patterns. In 1954, for example, Carleton Coon discerned a “Negroid race” in most of sub-Saharan Africa, Melanesia, remote reaches of the Philippines and Malaysia, as well as the entire (modern) state of Andra Prahdesh in India.81 He also mapped an “Australian race” through most of the Australian outback, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in India, and the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. By 1966, however, Coon had substantially revised his view of racial geography.82 He now placed the “Asian Negroids” in an “Australoid” category and rechristened the African blacks as “Congoids.” His mapping of these supposed racial groups nonetheless continued to show incongruous patterns, evident in his notion that Luzon and the Malay Peninsula were occupied in 1492 by Australoids, when the rest of the Philippines and western Indonesia were supposedly inhabited by Mongoloids. He also viewed much of east central India as Australoid in 1492, and while he saw this territory as having substantially decreased by the 1960s, he also mapped another two areas of Australoid occupancy that had inexplicably emerged in the meantime in western India.83
In the process of translation from specialized works to popular texts, the contradictions of race as a spatial category have, if anything, been amplified. A geography textbook from 1978, for example, maps southern India, an area inhabited by very dark-skinned peoples, as “Caucasoid”—a category said to be “indexed by skin color.”84 Another geography text from 1990 depicts the same area simply as “White,” and it further informs the reader that eastern New Guinea is “Australian” in race, while western New Guinea is “Black” except for the “Pygmies” inhabiting the island’s central mountains.85 Here we see the myth of the nation-state, compounded by the myth of continents, being further contaminated by the myth of race. The resulting concoction is offered as fact in an introductory world geography course for university students.
Maps of “race” no longer have any legitimate place in global geography texts. For even as Carleton Coon was elaborating his contorted racial taxonomy, Ashley Montagu was demolishing the biological basis of race as a concept.86 Montagu and like-minded scholars advanced three powerful arguments. First, all identified racial characteristics are biologically superficial, and in no way challenge the fundamental biological unity of humankind. Second, any given racial attribute tends to mutate gradually as one traverses the landscape; distinct transitions from one “racial group” to another are almost never encountered. (While racialist theory ascribes this phenomenon to “racial mixing,” “pure races” have never been isolated.) Third, and most compelling from the geographic point of view, each racial characteristic has its own distributional patterns. The global map of skin color, for example, bears little resemblance to the map of hair form or to the map of head shape. One can thus map races only if one selects one particular trait as more essential than others. (The 1963 Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, regards hair texture as the prime racial determinant.)87 Yet no real evidence can be offered to show why the selection of such an isolated trait is not entirely arbitrary.
Nor is any firmer basis for racial categories to be found under the skin. The most rigorous investigation to date of global genetic patterns—L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paulo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza’s massive History and Geography of Human Genes—finds that racial categories are genetically meaningless. The authors conclude that while one can identify “ ‘clusters of populations’ exhibiting genetic similarities,” such clusters simply cannot be “identified with races.”88 In fact, their painstaking genetic mapping and multivariate analysis fairly demolish the familiar “races of humanity.” For example, the northern Chinese are shown to be more closely related to northern Europeans than they are to southern Chinese.89 And Africans, far from forming a uniform race, actually show more genetic diversity than do all of the world’s non-African peoples put together.
In a word, while race is indisputably an important cultural construct, it fails as a natural category on biogeographical grounds. The presumed correspondence between the distribution of racial traits simply does not exist. Only by abandoning the doctrine of geographical concordance—the belief that a wide array of unrelated features should correspond in their spatial patterns—can we begin to ascertain the macrogeography of human life.
In some senses, both Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism make easy targets. Both rely on simplistic spatial categories, and both invoke modes of reasoning that have been widely discredited in recent scholarship. If we have given extended coverage to these crude geographical constructs, it is out of our conviction that even the most elemental building blocks of popular macrogeography deserve careful scrutiny. This conviction animated our first three chapters as well, where we focused on the crudest of schema: continents, East-West, and Orient-Occident.
Having revealed the problems of those simple but pervasive categories, we are now ready to turn our attention to the more elaborate frameworks within which professional scholars have organized their knowledge of the world. The next chapter explores the essentially historical traditions of civilizations and world systems; the succeeding chapter takes up the essentially geographical tradition of demarcating distinct world regions. Along the way, we begin to face the challenge of going beyond all of these frameworks, to come up with a more supple and accurate map of the world.