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| '''Molefi Kete Asante''' (born ], 1942) is an ] scholar. A ]<ref name="Faculty">{{cite web |url= http://www.temple.edu/aas/faculty_bios/asante.htm |title= Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of African American Studies |format= ] |work= ] faculty page |quote= }}</ref> at ], Asante has done work on the theory of ] and in transracial, intercultural, and international communication. Asante, the author of over 65 books and more than 300 articles, is considered to be one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in the field of African and African American Studies. | '''Molefi Kete Asante''' (born ], 1942) is an ] scholar. A ]<ref name="Faculty">{{cite web |url= http://www.temple.edu/aas/faculty_bios/asante.htm |title= Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of African American Studies |format= ] |work= ] faculty page |quote= }}</ref> at ], Asante has done work on the theory of ] and in transracial, intercultural, and international communication. Asante, the author of over 65 books and more than 300 articles, is considered to be one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in the field of African and African American Studies. | ||
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| ==Biography== | ==Biography== | ||
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| Molefi Kete Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr.<ref name="Speech">{{cite web |url= http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/messages/1/16977.html |title= The World of the African Writer and Artist Fifty Years After the 1956 Conference |author= Molefi Kete Asante at ] in ], ] ] |format= ] |work= ] |quote= }}</ref><ref name="Turner">{{cite web |url= http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9347%28200207%2932%3A6%3C711%3AAOHIMK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage |title= An Oral History Interview: Molefi Kete Asante |author= Diane D. Turner |format= ] |work= ], Vol. 32, No. 6 (July 2002) pp. 711-734 |quote= }}</ref> in ], one of sixteen children. His maternal ] is traced to ] heritage in ] and his paternal ] ancestry goes back to the ] in ]. Asante is married to Ana Yenenga and is the father of a daughter Kasina Eka, who writes poetry and paints, and a son, ], a filmmaker, author, and professor. His parents, Arthur and Lillie Smith, were laborers. His father worked first in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia-Southern Railways. Asante’s parents named him Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., but were pleased when he later changed his name to Molefi Kete Asante to reflect his African heritage and a rejection of a slave name. When Asante graduated from college he was the first member of his family to complete a college degree. Asante got his BA from Oklahoma Christian College in l964. He received his Master’s degree from ] in l965; this degree was followed by the Ph.D. degree from UCLA in l968. | Molefi Kete Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr.<ref name="Speech">{{cite web |url= http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/messages/1/16977.html |title= The World of the African Writer and Artist Fifty Years After the 1956 Conference |author= Molefi Kete Asante at ] in ], ] ] |format= ] |work= ] |quote= }}</ref><ref name="Turner">{{cite web |url= http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9347%28200207%2932%3A6%3C711%3AAOHIMK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage |title= An Oral History Interview: Molefi Kete Asante |author= Diane D. Turner |format= ] |work= ], Vol. 32, No. 6 (July 2002) pp. 711-734 |quote= }}</ref> in ], one of sixteen children. His maternal ] is traced to ] heritage in ] and his paternal ] ancestry goes back to the ] in ]. Asante is married to Ana Yenenga and is the father of a daughter Kasina Eka, who writes poetry and paints, and a son, ], a filmmaker, author, and professor. His parents, Arthur and Lillie Smith, were laborers. His father worked first in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia-Southern Railways. Asante’s parents named him Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., but were pleased when he later changed his name to Molefi Kete Asante to reflect his African heritage and a rejection of a slave name. When Asante graduated from college he was the first member of his family to complete a college degree. Asante got his BA from Oklahoma Christian College in l964. He received his Master’s degree from ] in l965; this degree was followed by the Ph.D. degree from UCLA in l968. | ||
| ===Education=== | |||
| After one year as an assistant professor of Communication at ], the University of California asked Asante to return to his doctoral institution as director of the Center for African American Studies and eventually as associate professor. He created the Master’s program in African American Studies at UCLA. After three years, he left UCLA for State University of New York at Buffalo as Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication. He was 30-years-old and one of the youngest full professors ever appointed at SUNY. At Buffalo he worked in concert with ] to produce a number of outstanding African doctoral students, many of them would later work in the liberated countries of Zimbabwe and South Africa. | |||
| Born in ], one of sixteen children, he was originally named Arthur Lee Smith Jr. He changed his name to reflect his claim to be descended in part from the ] people of West Africa. He received his ] from ] in ], his ] from ] in ], and his ] from ], in ], all in ]. | |||
| Asante re-wrote the Master’s program in Communication at SUNY-Buffalo in the early l970s, adding courses on Intercultural Communication. Increasingly involved in international politics Asante writes policy documents and position papers based on Afrocentricity on the renaissance of Africa along lines of a federative African state. Asante has produced more than 135 doctoral students; his students are responsible for over one hundred books. No academic has impacted African American Studies’ curriculum, graduate students, and journal publication as much as Asante who, as the long time editor of the ], has created an entirely new international community of scholars. | |||
| ===Career=== | |||
| - He was appointed a full professor at the age of 30 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the distinguished academic career that followed, Asante published 61 scholarly books, more than 300 papers and articles, and directed more than 125 Ph.D. ]s. He has published more scholarly books than any contemporary African author and has recently been recognized as one of the ten most widely cited African Americans. In addition, ''Black Issues in Higher Education'' recognized him as one of the most influential leaders in the last 15 years. Asante's greatest contribution is generally considered to be his theory of ], a re-examination of traditional scholarship from the perspective of ]n and African ] peoples and their interconnectedness with all the peoples of the world. In ], Asante became the founding editor of the ''Journal of Black Studies'', a central publication for Afrocentric theory. | |||
| ==Intellectual Stages== | |||
| Molefi Kete Asante’s intellectual and activist career can be viewed in three important stages. | |||
| The first stage might be called ''Idealist''. Once Asante completed his Ph.D. at ], ], at the age of 26, he started his professional career at ] and soon returned to teach at UCLA and to become the first permanent director of the UCLA Center for African American Studies. During this period Asante advanced his work in the field of communication, particularly communication across races and cultures. His first books on this subject were ''Transracial Communication'', ''Handbook of Intercultural Communication,'' and ''Language, Communication and Rhetoric in Black America,'' and ''Contemporary Public Communication.'' Asante wrote 17 books during this phase of his intellectual work winning numerous awards for distinctive scholarship. | |||
| The second stage of his intellectual career might be called ''Realist.'' During this phase Asante sets out a new vision of communication, combining it with an emphasis on values, and presenting a critical re-interpretation of many communication concepts and ideas. In fact, it was in the second stage, the Realist stage of his work, that he studied and mastered ], a language that he was later to teach to graduate students in African American Studies. However, his knowledge of ancient Egyptian history and culture led Asante to challenge the periodization of African history established by European scholarship. ] predated ] by thousands of years and therefore, according to Asante, it was necessary to reconsider questions of the beginnings of ], ], ], writing, ], ], and ]. Books out of this stage included works such as ''The Afrocentric Idea''; ''Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge''; ''The Egyptian Philosophers''; and ''The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism''. | |||
| The third stage of Asante’s intellectual work, ''Pan African Afrocentricity'', has seen the growing internationalization of Afrocentricity as a theoretical idea in which concepts of agency, location, disorientation, direction, centeredness, and marginality have been interpreted as the essential components of any serious discourse on the re-centering of an African population taken off of its own terms. This work has made him famous on the African continent by virtue of his role as consultant to African presidents, the African Union, and as a popular columnist for the largest weekly newspaper in Africa. Engaging postmodernists, Euro-globalists, and African compradors, Asante maintains a high profile in the discourse on the creation of an African Federative State. Asante’s objective appears to be the re-writing of African history in the light of African agency and the framing of a paradigm to be used for a general African resurgence. | |||
| ==Influences== | |||
| Asante, the author of ''The History of Africa; Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait''; and co-author with Emeka Nwadiora of the book, ''Spear Masters: An Introduction to African Religion'', has contributed and written about African culture, history, and values in an effort to interject the African ethical issue in all discussions of human community. He has written commentaries and reviews on most leading figures in African American Studies and has employed various methods and procedures for assessing data. | |||
| Fundamentally, Asante argues that it is the orientation to data, not the data themselves, that determines Afrocentricity. His writings are critical, interpretative, historical, analytical, and metatheoretical, but he has also written three or four textbooks for students. Finally, Asante’s work has influenced anthropology, sociology, religion, philosophy, education, political science, urban studies, criminololgy, history, social work, and communication. Given the extent of his influence, range of his publications, impact of his activist scholarship, Asante’s career might be considered parallel to the discourse in African and African American Studies inasmuch as he is responsible for initiating curricula, editing the premier journal, creating the first doctoral program, and co-editing both the ] and the ]. Closely allied to the Temple Circle of Afrocentricity that has included Ama Mazama, Nah Dove, C. T. Keto, and Terry Kershaw, Asante maintains intellectual discourse with scholars from China, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, and France as well. He has relied upon the work of Maulana Karenga for ethical and moral grounding in the traditions of ancient Egyptians. In addition, the works of ], Shi-xu, Miike, ], ], ], ], Blaut, and Ki-zerbo have influenced his thinking about the nature of human cultural resurgence. | |||
| As one can see from reading his book, The Afrocentric Idea (1998) there is considerable residual influence from his training as a rhetorician. Much of his work in The Afrocentric Idea stakes its case on the idea of human interaction as a key component of understanding different cultures. This communication influence may be one of the strongest aspects of Asante's early writings. | |||
| ==A Discipline== | |||
| The definitional issue is at the root of Africology. Is it a discipline or a field of study? Many of the leading figures such as Maulana Karenga, James Stewart, to name a few, have taken Africology to be a field. However, Asante, following the work of Ama Mazama, offered an argument for the discipline view saying that Black Studies was not conceived as an aggregation of courses about African people but the Afrocentric study of African people. Such a study would be considered Africology, a discipline, not a field of studies. In the creation of an environment for the discourse around discipline Asante has written critical reviews of numerous authors. Asante has taken a stance against certain ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, and others. In addition, Asante has criticized what he calls “spookism,” the heavy reliance on religion by some African American intellectuals. Asante’s concern has been that the “preachers” often replace analysis with moralizing and dependence when it is necessary to advance a clear, rational agenda toward African agency. | |||
| When Asante wrote ''Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation'' he was trying to explain how the two visions of the American nation, Wilderness and Promised Land, had colored the way Africans and whites saw the American society. When whites came to North America they saw a mountaintop of possibilities. The African people saw a valley of great despair. The realities were different and the responses to the environment were different. Asante argued that blacks were not whites in blackface. What made the African American different from the whites were historical experiences. White racial domination created a web of arguments based on the notion of race as described in the literature. Of course, Asante has argued against biological determinism, but that does not mean that he argues against difference. Black people tend to be phenotypically different from white people and vice versa; though this is not necessarily so in specific cases. Yet what this means is that society recognizes differences; what is illegitimate is the imputing of inferiority or superiority to those differences. | |||
| Asante’s book, ''The History of Africa: Quest for Eternal Harmony'', appeared in 2007 as the first comprehensive Afrocentric history of the African continent. Asante asserted that the African narrative had rarely been told from the standpoint of African agency. ''The History of Africa'' opened a new chapter in African historiography by seeking to uncover the voice of the African in every significant event in continental history. Turning his attention to the African revivalist spirit in politics and culture and a new Pan African Afrocentric tendency, Asante wrote the book, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance, as a declaration of African liberation from the conceptual stranglehold of Eurocentric ideas. | |||
| Molefi Kete Asante is the author of over 60 books<ref name="Faculty"/> and 300 articles. | |||
| ==Filmography== | ==Filmography== | ||
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Molefi Kete Asante (born August 14, 1942) is an African American scholar. A professor at Temple University, Asante has done work on the theory of Afrocentricity and in transracial, intercultural, and international communication. Asante, the author of over 65 books and more than 300 articles, is considered to be one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in the field of African and African American Studies.
Asante created the world's first Ph.D. program in African American Studies at Temple University in l988, co-founded the Journal of Black Studies, co-authored the Encyclopedia of Black Studies with Ama Mazama, co-authored the Handbook of Black Studies with Maulana Karenga, wrote the two most important works of theory in the field, named the field Afrology which was later called Africology by Winston Van Horne, established the first conference for graduate students in the field of African American Studies, and launched an international movement to gain international credibility for the field in Brazil, Ghana, Senegal, Spain, Germany, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, China, France, Norway, England, and other nations, speaking to the people, the politicians, and media in those countries and expounding the theory of Afrocentricity in community, art, and social venues. Asante has received more than one hundred awards for scholarship and activism against racism.
Biography
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Molefi Kete Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, one of sixteen children. His maternal mitochondrial DNA is traced to Nubian heritage in Sudan and his paternal Y-Chromosome ancestry goes back to the Yoruba in Nigeria. Asante is married to Ana Yenenga and is the father of a daughter Kasina Eka, who writes poetry and paints, and a son, M.K. Asante, Jr., a filmmaker, author, and professor. His parents, Arthur and Lillie Smith, were laborers. His father worked first in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia-Southern Railways. Asante’s parents named him Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., but were pleased when he later changed his name to Molefi Kete Asante to reflect his African heritage and a rejection of a slave name. When Asante graduated from college he was the first member of his family to complete a college degree. Asante got his BA from Oklahoma Christian College in l964. He received his Master’s degree from Pepperdine University in l965; this degree was followed by the Ph.D. degree from UCLA in l968.
Education
Born in Valdosta, Georgia, one of sixteen children, he was originally named Arthur Lee Smith Jr. He changed his name to reflect his claim to be descended in part from the Asante people of West Africa. He received his B.A. from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964, his M.A. from Pepperdine University in 1965, and his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968, all in communication studies.
Career
- He was appointed a full professor at the age of 30 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the distinguished academic career that followed, Asante published 61 scholarly books, more than 300 papers and articles, and directed more than 125 Ph.D. dissertations. He has published more scholarly books than any contemporary African author and has recently been recognized as one of the ten most widely cited African Americans. In addition, Black Issues in Higher Education recognized him as one of the most influential leaders in the last 15 years. Asante's greatest contribution is generally considered to be his theory of Afrocentricity, a re-examination of traditional scholarship from the perspective of African and African diasporal peoples and their interconnectedness with all the peoples of the world. In 1969, Asante became the founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies, a central publication for Afrocentric theory.
Filmography
Asante has appeared in many documentary works, including "The Faces of Evil," "Marshall Keeble," and the award-winning film, "500 Years Later", alongside Maulana Karenga, Kimani Nehusi, Paul Robeson Jr, and others. The latter film was written and produced by M.K. Asante, Jr. and directed by Owen Shahadah. In addition to these films, Asante has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs including top programs on BBC, NBC, ABC, CNN, TNT, MSNBC, and CBS.
References
- "Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of African American Studies" (html). Temple University faculty page.
- Molefi Kete Asante at UNESCO in Paris, 21 September 2006. "The World of the African Writer and Artist Fifty Years After the 1956 Conference" (html). AALBC.com.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - Diane D. Turner. "An Oral History Interview: Molefi Kete Asante" (html). Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 32, No. 6 (July 2002) pp. 711-734.
Ronald Jackson and Sonja Brown Givens, Black Pioneers in Communication Research. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007.
Jon Spayde, “People Who Could Change Your Life: 1995 Visionaries” Utne Magazine (Profile).
Christopher Williams, “In defence of materialism: a critique of Afrocentric ontology,” Race and Class, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2005
Dhyana Ziegler, Molefi Kete Asante: In Praise and Criticism. Nashville: Winston Derek, 1995.
