Afrocentricity and Westernity: A Critical Dialogue in Search of the Demise of the Inhuman

Abstract

This dissertation is a fundamental critique of the Western discourse using an Afrocentric critical reading of major Western constructions of knowledge. As such the study examines both the origins and dehumanizing consequences of the European project of Modernity. The study departs from the thesis that Afrocentricity, a philosophical paradigm conceptually rooted in African cultures and values, brings renewed ethical and social significance to a sustained project of human agency, liberation, and equality. Thus the dissertation explores how each major Western idea is understood within the context of the revolutionary philosophical paradigm and epistemological theory of social change. Concepts like individualism, domination, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, progress and supremacy that Molefi Kete Asante calls the “infrastructures of dominance and privilege” are reviewed against the backdrop of agency, community, commonality, cultural centeredness, and ma’at. Indeed, employing critical ideas from the works of Afrocentrists this study highlights the inadequacy of Westernity in overcoming the various forms of oppression. Modernism, Marxism, Existentialism, Feminism, Post-modernism, and Post-colonialism, are addressed in dialogue with Afrocentricity as an exploratory part of a two-way relationship between theoretical understanding and practice which challenges established and hegemonic approaches to knowledge. In fact, the study argues for a rational approach to conceptual “rupture” that would allow the scholar to navigate the shattered ideologies of Western thought, and to contribute to the exposure of the imperialistic ambitions that worked at the backstage of the political and economic philosophies of Europe since the early fifteen century. In effect, the dissertation can be viewed as an intellectual journey moving from an epistemological location in Western epistemology towards an Afrocentric paradigm and theory of knowledge in the quest to defeat the inhuman. Ultimately, the aim is the search for a more humanistic and ideologically less polluted mind and for a more human humanity.