Afrophobic Historiographies
Afrophobic historiographies are those in which decenter African people from African perception of realities past and present. When people of African descent write such historiographies, they take on similar natures as lynched or decapitated texts (Asante, 1992).11According to Asante (1992), “Decapitated text s exists without cultural presence in the historical experiences of the creator; a Lynched text is one that has been strung up with the tropes and figures of the dominating culture. African American authors who have tried to “shed their race” have been known to produce both types of texts.” There are two primary assertions under this notion, being Chronophobic and Ethnophobic narratives (Adé, T., & Samuels, T., 2019). Chronophobic narratives are any resistance to the presentation of African cultural history that is transgenerational (e.g., capable of beginning with the ancient civilizations of the Nile Valley and before) and transcontinental. Perhaps a safe way to avoid being a chronophobe of African history is to utilize the aforementioned Diopian Historiography.
Ethnophobic narratives can somewhat overlap with chronophobic notions of the history of African people. Within this overlap, any interpretation that presents African people as something other than culturally African can, depending on the circumstance, have both chronophobic and ethnophobic implications. However, ethnophobic narratives can also more specifically be any flagrant or fallacious misrepresentation of African people, written particularly by African people themselves. Given this particularity, ethnophobes are writers of African heritage who exemplify a phobia (irrational fear) of their own ethnicity. Ethnicity is utilized here broadly to indicate that ethnophobes have little or no faith in African paradigms and intellectual heritage due to their bondage to eurocentric intellectual plantations. Ethnophobes tend to make certain erroneous assumptions about what Africologists consider “African history” or “African people”, often relegating such (and similar) terms to mere essentialism.22Western and especially modernist scholars often use the term Essentialist as a caricature of what it is to be an Afrocentrist or Africologist. It is often used as a way to enhance their strawman arguments against those who use the Afrocentric Paradigm as their guiding theoretical methodology. It is a erroneous and ridiculous notion as no Africologists argues a historical or contemporary ethnic monolithism, but rather that within the cultural ethos of African people lies the historical basis for cultural, political, and economic unity and solidarity amongst the various ethnicities of the African world.