Molefi Kete Asante

Molefi Kete Asante (/əˈsænteɪ/ ə-SAN-tay; born Arthur Lee Smith Jr.; August 14, 1942) is an American philosopher who is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies.^[1] He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University,^[2][3] where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.^[4][5][6]

Molefi Kete Asante
Born	Arthur Lee Smith Jr. (1942-08-14) August 14, 1942 (age 82) Valdosta, Georgia, United States
Occupation(s)	Professor Author
Spouse	Ana Yenenga
Website	drmolefiasante.squarespace.com

Asante advocates for Afrocentricity^[7][8] He is the author of more than 66 books and the founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies.^[9][10] He is the father of author and filmmaker M. K. Asante.^[4]

Early life and education

Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, the fourth of sixteen children. His father, Arthur Lee Smith, worked in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia Southern Railroad; his mother worked as a domestic.^[11] During the summers Asante would return to Georgia to work in the tobacco and cotton fields in order to earn tuition for school. An aunt, Georgia Smith, influenced him to pursue his education; she gave him his first book, a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens.^[12]

Smith attended Nashville Christian Institute, a Church of Christ-founded boarding school for black students, in Nashville, Tennessee. There he earned his high school diploma in 1960.^[12] While still in high school, he became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Fisk University student march in Nashville.^[13]

After graduation, he initially enrolled in Southwestern Christian College of Terrell, Texas, another historically black institution with Church of Christ roots.^[12] There he met Nigerian Essien Essien, whose character and intelligence inspired Smith to learn more about Africa.^[14][tone]

Smith received his B.A. from Oklahoma Christian College (now Oklahoma Christian University) in 1964. He did graduate work, earning his master's degree from Pepperdine University in 1965 with a thesis on Marshall Keeble, a black preacher in the Church of Christ.^[15] Smith earned his PhD from UCLA in 1968 in communication studies. He worked for a time at UCLA, becoming the director of the Center for Afro-American Studies.^[11] At the age of 30, he was appointed by the University at Buffalo as a full professor and head of the Department of Communication.^[11]

In 1976, Asante chose to make a legal name change because he considered "Arthur Lee Smith" a slave name. ^[16]

Honors

• Given the regnal name of Nana Okru Asante Peasah and the chieftaincy title of Kyidomhene of the House of Tafo, Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana (1995)
• Given the chieftaincy title of the Wanadoo of Gao in the court of the Amiru (Paramount Chief) Hassimi Maiga of Songhai (2012)

Afrocentricity

According to The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Historical Writing Since 1945, Asante has "based his entire career on Afrocentricity, and continues to defend it in spite of strong criticisms".^[17]

In 1980 Asante published Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, which initiated a discourse around the issue of African agency and subject place in historical and cultural phenomena.^[18] He maintained that Africans had been moved off-center in terms on most questions of identity, culture, and history. Afrocentricity sought to place Africans at the center of their own narratives and to reclaim the teaching of African-American history from where it had been marginalized by Europeans.

The combination of the European centuries gives us about four to five hundred years of solid European domination of intellectual concepts and philosophical ideas. Africa and Asia were subsumed under various headings of the European hierarchy. If a war between the European powers occurred it was called a World War and the Asians and Africans found their way on the side of one European power or the other. There was this sense of assertiveness about European culture that advanced with Europe's trade, religious, and military forces.^[19]

Asante's book The Afrocentric Idea was a more intellectual book about Afrocentricity than the earlier popular book. After the second edition of The Afrocentric Idea was released in 1998, Asante appeared as a guest on a number of television programs, including The Today Show, 60 Minutes, and the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, to discuss his ideas.

According to Asante's Afrocentric Manifesto, an Afrocentric project requires a minimum of five characteristics: (1) an interest in a psychological location, (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place, (3) the defense of African cultural elements, (4) a commitment to lexical refinement, and (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the history of Africa.^[20][21]

I chose the term Afrocentricity to emphasize the fact that African people had been moved off of terms for the past five hundred years. In other words, Africans were not simply removed from Africa to the Americas, but Africans were separated from philosophies, languages, religions, myths, and cultures. Separations are violent and are often accompanied with numerous changes in individuals and groups. Finding a way to relocate or to reorient our thinking was essential to the presentation of African cultural reality. In fact, without such a reorientation, Africans have nothing to bring to the table of humanity but the experiences of Europeans, those who initially moved Africans off of social, cultural, and psychological terms.^[22]

Selected bibliography

• Transracial Communication (Prentice Hall, 1973), ISBN 978-0-13-929505-8
• Contemporary Public Communication: Applications (Harper & Row, 1977)
• Mass Communication: Principles and Practices (Macmillan, 1979)
• Contemporary Black Thought: Alternative Analyses in Social and Behavioral Science (Sage, 1980)
• The Afrocentric Idea (Temple University Press, 1987, 1998)
• Afrocentricity (Africa World Press, 1988), ISBN 9780865430679
• The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics (Africa World Press, 1999), ISBN 978-0-86543-743-2
• Socio-Cultural Conflict between African American and Korean American (University Press of America, 2000)
• 100 Greatest African Americans (Prometheus, 2002)
• Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (African American Images, 2003), ISBN 978-0913543795
• Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation (Prometheus, 2003, 2009)
• Encyclopedia of Black Studies (Sage, 2004), ISBN 978-0-7619-2762-4
• Handbook of Black Studies (Sage, 2006), ISBN 978-0-7619-2840-9
• An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Polity, 2007), ISBN 978-0-7456-4103-4
• Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait (Sankore Madrasah, 2007)
• Spear Masters: An Introduction to African Religion (University Press of America, 2007), ISBN 978-0-7618-3574-5
• Encyclopedia of African Religion (Sage, 2009), ISBN 978-1412936361
• Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait (Polity, 2009), ISBN 978-0745648279
• As I Run toward Africa: A Memoir (Paradigm Publishers, 2011), ISBN 978-1-61205-098-0
• The African American People: A Global History (Routledge, 2012), ISBN 978-0415872546
• Facing South to Africa: Toward an Afrocentric Critical Orientation (Lexington Books, 2014)
• Contemporary Critical Thought in Africology and Africana Studies (Lexington Books, 2016)
• Revolutionary Pedagogy: A Primer for Teachers of Black Children (Universal Write Publications, 2017), ISBN 978-0982532744
• (With Nah Dove) Being Human Being: Transforming the Race Discourse (Universal Write Publications, 2022), ISBN 9781942774099

References

1. Gerald G. Jackson (February 2005). We're Not Going to Take It Anymore. Beckham Publications Group, Inc. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-931761-84-3. Retrieved September 18, 2011.
2. "Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of Africology". Temple University faculty page. Archived from the original on December 10, 2012.
3. Jon Spayde (1995). "Utne Visionaries: People Who Could Change Your Life". Utne Reader.
4. Official site Biography http://www.asante.net/biography/ December 17, 2012
5. Maulana Karenga, "Molefi Kete Asante and the Afrocentric Initiative: Mapping His Intellectual Impact", Los Angeles Sentinel, September 20, 2007, p. A7.
6. Maulana Karenga, "Institutionalizing the Afrocentric Initiative: Securing a Centered Way Forward," Los Angeles Sentinel, March 22, 2012, p. A7.
7. Ronald L. Jackson and Sonja Brown Givens, Black Pioneers in Communication Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.
8. Dhyana Ziegler, ed. Molefi Kete Asante: In Praise and Criticism. Nashville, TN: Winston Derek, 1995.
9. Molefi Kete Asante at Sage Publications.
10. Ama Mazama (ed.), Essays in Honor of an Intellectual Warrior, Molefi Kete Asante. Paris, France: Editions Menaibuc, 2008.
11. Turner, Diane D.; Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). "An Oral History Interview: Molefi Kete Asante". Journal of Black Studies. 32 (6): 711–734. doi:10.1177/00234702032006005. JSTOR 3180971. S2CID 143525213.
12. Patricia Reid-Merritt. "Molefi Kete Asante," Encyclopedia of African American History, Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker (eds), ABC-CLIO, 2010, pp. 617–618.
13. Dr. John Henrik Clark Group Research Project. We're not going to take it anymore, Gerald G. Jackson (ed.), Beckham Publications Group, Inc., 2005, pp. 90–91.
14. Asante, Molefi K. (2011). As I Run Toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. p. 181. ISBN 978-1-61205-098-0.
15. "Molefi Kete Asante". The History Makers. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
16. Asante, Molefi Kete (1993). "Racism, Consciousness, and Afrocentricity". In Early, Gerald Lyn (ed.). Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. Penguin Books. pp. 140–141. ISBN 0713991011.
17. Schneider, Axel; Woolf, Daniel (May 5, 2011). The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-103677-4.
18. Karenga (1993). Introduction to Black Studies. University of Sankore Press. ISBN 978-0-943412-16-0.
19. Molefi Kete Asante, "De-Westernizing Communication: Strategies for Neutralizing Cultural Myths", in Wang, Georgette (2010). De-Westernizing Communication Research: Altering Questions and Changing Frameworks. Routledge. pp. 21–7. ISBN 978-1-136-93537-4.
20. Molefi Kete Asante, "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in the World", in Asante, Molefi Kete; Miike, Yoshitaka; Yin, Jing (2008). The Global Intercultural Communication Reader. Routledge. pp. 101–110. ISBN 978-0-415-95812-7.
21. Asante, Molefi Kete (2013). An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-7456-5498-0.
22. Molefi Kete Asante and Yoshitaka Miike, "Paradigmatic Issues in Intercultural Communication Studies: An Afrocentric-Asiacentric Dialogue," China Media Research, Vol. 9, No. 3, July 2013, p. 4.

External links

• Works by or about Molefi Kete Asante at the Internet Archive
• Dr. Molefi Kete Asante – Official Web site
• Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies