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.