The Misrepresentation of Diop's Views

Bibliographic Data

ID18949530
AuthorsJ D Walker (0000-0002-3706-2729, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume26
Issue1
Pages77-85
Publication date1995-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Black Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9347 • E-ISSN: 1552-4566
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002193479502600106
OpenAlexW2036695174
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

The late Cheikh Anta Diop was perhaps the strongest opponent from Africa of bias in historical scholarship, broadly defined. His work and purpose have been frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted. It is also very likely that his views, or some of them, have been seriously misrepresented. The purpose of this brief essay is to examine in a preliminary fashion recent statements or implications about Diop by a team from the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Washington (Seattle). Diop's work is not defended or refuted. The concern is with what Diop really said or did. Brace et al. (1993) state that Diop's writing (among others) is a case of inverted racism. (p. 2) They also state that his definition of Black or African (by implication) includes only those with the stereotyped caricatured West African(?) physiognomy described in some literature as the True which is sometimes coterminous with the Forest and sometimes not. The word Negro in the sense of denoting a type, a narrow set of traits is used to connote an erroneous concept of the only real biological African, much as some used to believe that the only real European (Caucasian) had the stereotyped physiognomy, which would greatly reduce the numbers of Europeans or Whites. Of course there never was an entire population spatially or culturally defined, whose individuals all conformed to some abstracted Nordic or East Baltic type (well-defined single sets of traits). However, Negro, like Nordic, should be understood as denoting one ensemble of traits or anatomical trends in the numerous interconnected populations of Saharo-tropical Africa, or just Africa. The Negro physiognomy

Genealogy · Misrepresentation · Physiognomy · Political science · Population · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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