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    8) - Leith Mullings, "Reclaiming Culture - The Dialectics of Identity"

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    16 Reclaiming Culture: The Dialectics of Identity Leith Mullings Inthe last decade African Americans have once again be: = Iy commited to reclaiming thee culture and history. Ths ha taken, rriety of forms and is evident in phenomena as diverse as the ‘iconization of Malcolm X, the struggle around the African burial ground in New York pee sae eacnetitiry Peete and clothing, mass Afrocentric philosophy, Se aaa reeeeeeeen cae oe Among African Americans the term Afrocentricity may he used cather - broadly to refer to_a range of loosely integrated beliefs, practices, values, orientations, and behaviors. For some it merely signals a sense of conti nity. with Africa and loyalty.to community.of African descent. For oth. ers Afrocentricity may be manifested in modes. ‘of dress, ritual practices, or other cultural activities. For still others Afrocentricity refers to recent at {tempts to systematize these orientations into a philosophical system of be- liefs and practices. I would like to address one essential element in these various approaches—the notion of culture. ‘The resurgent turn toward culture is in parta reaction to the failures of liberal integration, in part a consequence of the state-sponsored destruc tion of the left, and in pare a challenge to apologists for inequality who at- tribute. the.cause of increasing poverty to the culture of African Ameri- £2 long tradition of activist cans, But it also represents the continuati social scientists such as W. E. B. DuBois, who marveled at the inherent du- Reclaiming Culture 211 ality of African American culture and the transformation of the African ‘medicine owner, “a bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system rose the Negro preacher and under him the first Afro-American institution, the Negro church” (DuBois 1961 144). We walkin the footsteps of poets such as Countee Cullen, who pon- dered, “What is Africa to me?” and countless ordinary people whose everyday practices of speech, style, music, art, and ritual recall a home- land three centuries removed. ‘The point of departure for these diverse perspectives—the importance of the struggle for history and culture—is not at issue. “Culture is... . the product of ... history just as the flower is the product of a plant,” as, ‘Amilcar Cabral (1973:42) poetically put it. A sense of culture and history situates the individual in time and space, plotting the places occupied by ancestors gone before and descendants yet to come. Culture provides a framework through which communities interpret their past, understand their present, and imagine their future. ‘Therefore, as Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon have described, though from different vantage points, the dominant group’s power to rep- resent the history and culture of subaltern groups is an important tool in achieving and maintaining domination. Hegemonic cultural systems seek to impose preferences, to redefine standards of beauty, and to lay out ap- propriate categories of thought and action. But, perhaps most important, by interpreting the past and defining the limits of action, these ideological systems seek to depict the potential for the future, framing the boundaries for struggle. Thus the recent struggle around the African burial ground in ‘New York City was based on the knowledge that those who control the interpretation of the past also have a major role in charting the future. In the 1960s and 1970s attempts to confront the ideological underpin- ning of white supremacy within the academy were reinvigorated, Re- sponding to the militant civil rights movement and antiwar struggles, African Americans and others fought for the establishment of black stud. ies departments. Many ethnic, labor, and women’s studies departments ‘nurtured scholarship that produced the knowledge base for developing al- ternate approaches. This new body of scholarship laid the intellectual foundation for the contemporary challenge to the general curriculum, for contesting how knowledge is defined, created, and controlled, and for placing the experiences of workers, women, and people of color, rather than those of elites, at the center of the analysis. The challenge to the ide- ological hegemony of the dominant class—whether in the liberal form of 212 Leith Mullings a historian such as Arthur Schlesinger, the conservative form of an educa- {or Such as Diane Ravitch, or the many popular formulations denigrating African American history and culture from Myrdal to Moynihan hae been a critical aspect of our struggle. But opposition to official interpretations of history and culture, partc- ularly when linked to action, was generally met with derisive contempt or unrelenting hostility. Intolerance for rethinking history as experienced by People of color, coupled with institutional tolerance of racism, has shaped the conditions in which alternative frameworks have emerged. Furthermore, alternative interpretations face the difficult task of discn- S26ing from, even while critiquing, traditional categories and of rejecting the hegemonic framework that structures its own form of dissent. Indeed. ‘one attraction of Afrocentricty is the appearance of initiating a conversa, tion from the vantage point of another place, of creating a new space for discussion rather than accepting the categories sct out by dominant culture, Afrocentricity, then, is born of the unremitting Eurocentrism of the academy and other social institutions. Considering the large-scale inven. tion of history from the perspective of elite Europeans, Schlesinger’s charge that Afrocentricity is the “invention of tradition” (1992:86) s at best disingenuous and at worst blatantly dishonest. T would argue, however, that though Afrocentrcity represents an at- tempt to highlight the importance of culture, to reclaim history, and to correct the distortions of Eurocentrism, there are ways in which itis the

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