Branches of Asanteism explores the epistemologies and research methodologies that have sprung from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante’s treatises on Afrocentricity. The book identifies and analyzes thirteen such epistemologies and methodologies while defining and explicating the various “branches” of Asante’s idea of Afrocentricity.

Moving beyond the U.S.-Eurocentric paradigm of communication theory, this handbook broadens the intellectual horizons of the discipline by highlighting underrepresented, especially non-Western, theorists and theories, and identifies key issues and challenges for future scholarship. Showcasing diverse perspectives, the handbook facilitates active engagement in different cultural traditions and theoretical orientations that are global in scope but local in effect. It begins by exploring past efforts to diversify the field, continuing on to examine theoretical concepts, models, and principles rooted in local cumulative wisdom. It does not limit itself to the mass-interpersonal communication divide, but rather seeks to frame theory as global and inclusive in scope. The book is intended for communication researchers and advanced students, with relevance to scholars with an interest in theory within information science, library science, social and cross-cultural psychology, multicultural education, social justice and social ethics, international relations, development studies, and political science.

In An Afrocentric Pan Africanist Vision: Afrocentric Essays, Molefi Kete Asante, engages the age-old debate on Pan Africanism by providing an innovative orientation to the established discourse developed during the twentieth century. Asante opens an interrogation of the Padmorian tradition of a socialist Pan Africanism by suggesting that a deeper entry into the histories and narratives of the literary, economic, social, and spiritual values of the thousands of African societies scattered throughout the world could sustain a different agency analysis of Pan Africanism without grafting an external idea on the unity of Africa. Using his vast knowledge of the history of Africa, Asante suggests that the African renaissance cannot take place unless there is a commitment to creating an African community conscious of its own myths, origins, and economic, cultural, and philosophical traditions.

Ama Mazama: The Ogunic Presence in Africology is a critical analysis of the ideas of Ama Mazama, a prominent and leading female theorist in Africology and African American Studies. Molefe Asante studies the creative and productive power of Mazama’s intellectual work as it emerges from the personal wrestling with spiritual elements of consciousness as well as Mazama’s attention to ancestral and perhaps epigenetic relationships to African spirituality in the making of theory and practice. Painting a picture of an activist intellectual concerned as much with mental as well as spiritual liberation, Asante demonstrates how and why Ama Mazama has evolved into one of the most popular Africologists in the field.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established to provide the opportunity for higher education to people of African descent in the era of segregation. The visions, values, and heritages these schools embodied enabled them to chart new frontiers of learning, scholarship, and public engagement for and beyond the United States. Historically Black Colleges and Universities in a Globalizing World: The Past, the Present, and the Future, edited by Alem Hailu, Mohamed S. Camara, and Sabella O. Abidde examines the history and contribution of these institutions in the broader national and global sociopolitical context of the changes taking place in the nation and the world. Collectively, the contributors offer reflections and visions by both looking back and forward to find viable answers to the challenges and opportunities HBCUs face in the new century and beyond. They argue that as the world convulses by the new global dynamics of emerging pandemics, economic dislocations, and resource constraints, HBCUs are uniquely positioned to meet these challenges.

Written within the perspective of Africana critical studies, this book presents a transatlantic voyage and the depths of historical Black experience in Liverpool, England. The author addresses the narrative of the Black Atlantic propounded by Paul Gilroy and further reveals a firsthand account of a largely hidden aspect of Black British history.

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.

In July 1961, five months after Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, 14-year-old Brenda F. Berrian’s consciousness was raised by her family’s move to the turbulent Republic of the Congo. Race, Identity, and Privilege from the US to the Congo traces Berrian’s experiences of subsequently traveling the United States, Canada, France, and three other African countries against the backdrop of emerging African independence and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Detailing the complexities she faced in her global identity as a Black woman, Berrian explores how the love and support of her parents and her developing racial, feminist, and political consciousness--strengthened by her embrace of literature and music of the African diaspora--prepared her to deal with adversity, stereotypes, and grief along the way. See more info about the book here: www.brendafberrian.com

"American Educator, Activist, and Advocate provides in-depth research into Eleanor Archer's life as one of the first Black public school teachers in Des Moines and presents a gateway for academics to acknowledge the lives and ideas of women during the Jim Crow era, clarifying Black women's standpoint on the segregated South"--

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and civilization. And yet people generally don’t want to accept the scientific impression of Africa as the birthplace of human civilization. The skeptics include Africans themselves, a direct result of the colonial educational systems still in place across Africa, and even those Africans who acquire Western education, particularly in the humanities, have been trapped in the symptomatology of epistemic peonage. These colonial educational systems have overstayed their welcome and should be dismantled. This is where African agency comes in. Agential autonomy deserves an authoritative voice in shaping the curricular direction of Africa. Agential autonomy implicitly sanctions an Afrocentric approach to curriculum development, pedagogy, historiography, literary theory, indigenous language development, and knowledge construction. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics?information and communications technology (STEM-ICT) and research and development (R&D) both exercise foundational leverage in the scientific and cultural discourse of the kind of African Renaissance Cheikh Anta Diop envisaged. “Mr. Francis Kwarteng has written a book that looks at some of the major distortions of African history and Africa’s major contributions to human civilization. In this context, Mr. Kwarteng joins a long list of thinkers who roundly reject the foundational Eurocentric epistemology of Africa in favor of an Afrocentric paradigm of Africa’s material, spiritual, scientific, and epistemic assertion. Mr. Kwarteng places S.T.E.M. and a revision of the humanities at the center of the African Renaissance and critiques Eurocentric fantasies about Africa and its Diaspora following the critical examples of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ama Mazama, Molefi Kete Asante, Abdul Karim Bangura, Theophile Obenga, Maulana Karenga, Mubabingo Bilolo, Kwame Nkrumah, Ivan Van Sertima, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several others. Readers of this book will be challenged to look at Africa through a critical lens.” Ama Mazama, editor/author of Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future “There are countless books about the evolution of European intellectual thought but scarcely any that captures the pioneering contributions of Africans since the beginning of recorded knowledge in Kmet, a.k.a. Ancient Egypt. Well, that long drought has ended with the publication of Kwarteng's An Intellectual Biography of Africa: A Philosophical Anatomy of Advancing Africa the Diopian Way. Prepare to be educated.” Milton Allimadi, author of Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in the Media