Asante, Hooks, Hall, and West' Arguments

Asante seems to have a different view than the other authors. After reading over the Afrocentricity article plenty of times, I caught onto the themes more and more. This reading was difficult to understand and I found that going back and looking over my annotations and notes made it a little bit easier to comprehend. Starting with the explanation and definition of Afrocentricity, which is basically the African identity from the perspective of African people as centered, located, oriented, and grounded. Africans have lost their culture and have been dislocated . The act of Afrocentricity is to help Africans and people of African descent become relocated and noticed. It seems as though throughout this piece, the author stresses racism is so harsh and African Americans are treated so unfairly. Africans have been distancing themselves from their culture ever since they have been moved off the social, political, and economic terms and because the negative image of Africa. They don't want to be associated with Africa because then no one would accept them. Some Africans identify with being European and they write at a standpoint of a European. They basically consider themselves European and state that "it is impossible to be African and human." Some even claim that they came to American on the Mayflower or to the Caribbean as a plantation owner. They reject themselves because of their culture and they just want to gain the approval of the whites. It is stated that in many countries, there are many forms of racism. For example, in the Netherlands, African Americans were being compared to monkeys and they were the lowest form of hierarchy. West, Hooks, and Hall, on the other hand, tried to bring out the bright side and had solutions to this racism. Hall basically mentions that culture is always in the process of transformation. He talks about ethnicity. He mentions that ethnicity is framed historically, culturally, and politically. He brings out the word representation and explains how it is a way of talking about how things are represented and how one perceives and image. Hooks piece about Post Modernism touches on many different subjects. Shes mentions that the people that speak about Post Modernism is dominated by the voices of white mails and higher academic elites. There is hardly any mention of blacks in the white Post Modernism writings. The rise of women is also brought out by explaining how many of womens works on the discourse of post modernism offered new insights. She mentions that in order to take racism seriously, one has to look at all of the classes of African Americans. There is a black middle class, a growing black underclass, and because of deindustrialization, a black industrial working class. She wants to find a way to make strategies for change so that the people of the underclass can renew their spirits. West's piece includes ways to make a new cultural politics of difference. He says that in order to obtain this, people should be allowed the expansion of freedom and individuality. Everyone should have the same rights no matter what your sexuality, gender, race, culture, or bias is. There are three challenges that the new cultural politics of difference faces. These three are intellectual, existential, and political. Under the intellectual challenge, Matthew Arnold was one of the main people under this. He proposed a new conception of culture which sought to stabilize an emerging civil society. In order to make this happen, he wanted to emerge the middle classes and then merge all classes together. World War 1 occured and that ruined his plan. Another man emerged, Eliot, who wanted to restore Europe after the war. He liked the idea of civilization. The United States soon became a world power and it helped to fuel the Civil Rights and Black Power movement. The blacks wanted to fight for representaion and rights for themselves. They wanted to offer positive images of themselves and push the postmodernblacks intellectuals toward a new culture and politics. In the Existential challange, self- confidence, discipline, and perserverence are necessary for success. This approach stresses critics and artists to put aside the differences and free themselves to learn and build from the interactions around them. This approach can only work if there are communities, groups, organizations, institutions, subcultures, and networks of people of color who cultivate critical sensibilities. In the last approach, The Political challagne, the main idea it consists of is forging allies of people of white and black color to be guided by a moral and political vision and to gain individual freedom in all communities and states. These 4 authors have different viewpoints on African Americans and the racism and ways to halt and deal with it.