Race and the Writing of History
Riddling the Sphinx
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10023494 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Turley (University of Kent, corresponding author), Maghan Keita |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 194-194 |
| Publication date | 2002-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2700797 |
| OpenAlex | W1996387765 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Maghan Keita appears to have written this book out of an acute concern with the modern culture wars in the United States and the place of historical study in them. The book presents a historical genealogy of the controversy over Afrocentric historical writing and in particular of the debate over Martin Bernal'Black Athena (1987). Taking up Bernal'point that had he been a black scholar his ideas would have received little attention, Keita argues that Bernal had African American as well as African predecessors whose work has been marginalized. The argument is concerned with historiography, then, but also with “epistemologies,” meaning, in this context, the framework of assumptions out of which an understanding of the past is constructed. Keita believes that, from the Enlightenment on, contrasting views of black people constituted the basis of the frameworks shaping historical writing. “Ra-cialized thinking” became crucial to individual and group identity and has led to histories that are “ideological and propagandistic.” He quotes approvingly an article by Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth Smith that concludes, “our own social and political positions have everything to do with what stories we choose to tell.” In a world of binary racial categorizations, “white” historiography thus involved and, to an extent, continues to involve denigratory constructions of “blackness,” and it applies modern racial conceptions even to the distant past, a major reason for scholarly hostility to Bernal'thesis of an African influence through Egypt on the Greece that is at the root of European civilization
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Civilization · Context (archaeology · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Historiography · Identity (music · Ideology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Toleration · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2002 - 2015 (14) |
| Highly cited | No |