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cliquez ici pour la version française de cette page-toile
| Important
notice: List of publications Wim
van Binsbergen Over the years, the Shikanda portal (of which the present page on African religion has attracted the largest number of visitors) has grown to such size, and its internal structure has become so complex, that visitors have had increasing difficulty finding their way, even despite the internal search facility which appears on all the index pages of the various constituent websites. Since Wim van Binsbergen's main output consists of texts for publication, an updated list of publications with hyperlinks to all available fulltext digital texts seems the best remedy. Thanks to the good services of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in the course of current retrodigitalisation of its members published work, many more digital texts have recently come available, so that now the list of publications could be greatly improved and given a more prominent place in the Shikanda portal. This list is now being provided with clickable links to these uploaded publications. Since that time-consuming process has not yet been completed, of many articles listed, fulltext or draft versions are in fact available in the Shikanda portal, even though no links yet appear in the list of publications. Therefore, please also look at the separate webpages within the Shikanda portal, and use the internal search facility (see below). |
Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate: This website (established March, 2001) brings together a number of articles written by Wim van Binsbergen on the related topics of Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate. Through its Forum and its bibliographical section this website is intended to serve as a focus of exchange, not only on Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate but also on African history, global cultural history, identity, race, and intercultural philosophy.
This bilingual website is offered both in English and in French; click here for the French version of this page.
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proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work |
Internal Search Facility
Recent assessments of this work
In 1998, in the authoritative journal Classical Philology, Molly Myerowitz Levine (recognised specialist on the bibliography of the Black Athena debate) proclaimed Wim van Binsbergen's contributions to that debate to be 'the most interesting and the best informed'. More recently, two prominent francophone authors (Théophile Obenga et Jean-Loup Amselle) have assessed Wim van Binsbergen's stance on Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate. Click here to read their appraisals in full.
| August 2007: This year it is twenty years since Martin Bernal initiated the seminal anti-Eurocentrist Black Athena debate, with the first volume of his multi-volume project Black Athena, of which the long-awaited third volume was finally published in 2006. To celebrate this milestone of criticial anti-Eurocentrist debate, Wim van Binsbergen's collection Black Athena Ten Years After (Talanta 1997; details see below) -- a significant defense of Bernal against the devastating criticism by Lefkowitz and McLean Rogers in their book Black Athena Revisited (1996) -- is currently being reprinted, greatly updated and augmented, and now with increased critical distance from Bernal, as Black Athena Twenty Years After (Berlin/Boston: LIT). The book is to come out in 2007. |
Additions 2006 NEW
Recently, Wim van Binsbergen's ongoing research has offered several occasions to make further observations on Afrocentricity. These papers are not included in the present webpage on Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate, but clickable links are provided in the box now following:
| title | full bibliographical details |
| Hermeneutics of race, etc. as context for African philophy | van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, ‘Editorial: The Roman Catholic church, and the hermeneutics of race, as two contexts for African philosophy’, QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy/ Revue Africaine de Philosophie, XIX, No. 1-2, 2005: 3-20 |
| Mythological archaeology -- with a postscript on Afrocentricity | van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press, ‘Mythological archaeology: Situating sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths within a long-range intercontinental comparative perspective', in: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) , Proceedings of the Pre-Symposium / 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable on ‘Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia’, organised by RIHN, NIHU / Harvard University, the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 6-8 June, 2005, Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature; also, with a new postscript on Afrocentrist ideology, February 2006, at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/mythical_archaeology/kyoto_paper_final_2-2006.pdf |
| Global bee flight: first installment | Wim M.J. van Binsbergen, 1998-2006, ‘Skulls and tears: Identifying and analysing an African fantasy space extending over 5000 kilometres and across 5000 years’: Paper read at the conference ‘Fantasy spaces: The power of images in a globalizing world’ (convenors Bonno Thoden van Velzen & Birgit Meyer), part of the WOTRO [Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research] research programme ‘Globalization and the construction of communal identities’, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 26-29 August 1998, PDF, 46 pp. -- greatly expanded and revised version, 2006 |
| Defending Afrocentricity as potentially scientific, in the face of Mudimbe's universalism | van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, ' ''An incomprehensible miracle'' -- Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe's Tales of Faith', in: Kai Kresse, ed., Reading Mudimbe, special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, 17, 1, June 2005: 11-65 -- reiterates and extends the defence of Afrocentricity originally presented in French in Politique Africaine, 2000 (see below) |
Papers included in the present website:
(all papers © Wim van Binsbergen)
| title | provenance | |||
| Is there a future for Afrocentricism despite Stephen Howe's dismissive 1998 study? | paper prepared for the Colloque sur l'Afrocentrisme, Centre de Recherches Africaines, Universite Paris-I (Sorbonne), 9 Rue Malher, Paris, May 2, 2000 | |||
| A short defence of Afrocentrism in the light of Stephen Howe's 1998 book | English version of: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘Le point de vue de Wim van Binsbergen’, in: Autour d’un livre. Afrocentrism, de Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique, de Jean-Pierre chrétien [ sic ] , François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hélène Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine, no. 79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180 | |||
| With Black Athena into the Third Millennium CE? | paper read at the XVth
International Congress of Classical Archaeology,
Amsterdam 1999; a much shorter version has been published
in the proceedings of this Congress; A French version has
been published as: W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 2000,
‘Dans le troisième millénaire avec Black
Athena?’, in: Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrétien,
J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H.,
Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre
Égypte et Amérique, Paris:
Karthala, pp. 127-150
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| Alternative models of intercontinental interaction towards the earliest Cretan script |
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| Black Athena Ten Years After: towards a constructive re-assessment |
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| Geomantic divination (Ifa, Hakata, Sikidy) and the mankala board-game: rethinking Africa’s contribution to global cultural history |
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| Une défense de l'Afrocentrisme contre Stephen Howe | van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘Le point de vue de Wim van Binsbergen’, in: Autour d’un livre. Afrocentrism, de Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Amérique et l'Egypte, de Jean-Pierre chrétien [ sic ] , François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hélène Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine, no.79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180 | |||
| Dans le troisième millénaire avec Black Athena? | W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 2000, ‘Dans le troisième millénaire avec Black Athena?’, in: Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrétien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique, Paris: Karthala, pp. 127-150 | |||
some of the items above have been published in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, TALANTA volumes XXVII-XVIII (1996-1997), which has been out of print since 1998; a revised and much expanded reprint of this book is now in the press with LIT Verlag/ Transaction Press, under the title Black Athena Alive. You may write to the publishers to reserve a copy of the reprint edition.
Bibliographical section
It is impossible to appreciate, leave alone to participate in, the debates on Black Athena and Afrocentricity without at least some access to the enormous literature which serves as a background to these debates. Moreover, these debates themselves have meanwhile generated a substantial literature in their own right. Both debates touch on a wide range on previously detached fields of scholarship, ranging from African history to Greek and Egyptian mythology, Egyptology, Assyriology, classics, archaeology, historical linguistics, anthropology, etc. Even scholars who are certified specialists in any of these fields, are likely to be virtually ignorant of some, or many, of the other fields. As a result, these debates are characterised by the fact that, while eliciting considerable passion, they are inevitably conducted by partial or total lay people. The enormity of this situation calls for easily accessible and extensive bibliographical information.
click here to enter the very extensive bibliographical section
Forum/ Message board
Click on the larger blue rectangle below to access this site's Forum/Message board on Afrocentricity and Black Athena
DIRECTIONS:
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these belong to the person who made the last entry before
you, so do not forget to overwrite these
entries with your own name and e-mail address!
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Vignette and background illustration
the illustration used on this page is adapted from the image of a black-figure Greek vase from Athens, late 7th to early 5th century, originally representing a warrior arming himself ; the accurate and scaled representation of the continents amounts of course to an artistic liberty totally anachronistic in the original iconographic context. At the same time it evokes the centricity of Africa (with a focus on Ancient Egypt), and its relations with Ancient Greece -- some of the guiding ideas of this website. Finally, the illustration (by showing a modern map on an ancient vase) is an ironic comment on the mutual accusations, typical of the debates around Black Athena and Afrocentricity, to the effect that opponents have distorted ancient evidence so as to let it serve today's political priorities.
cliquez ici pour la version française de cette page-toile
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proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work |
| also a highly sensitive in-site search facility is now available at the overall Shikanda.net portal homepage, covering all Wim van Binsbergen's sites in a single search action |
| page last modified: 02-09-07 17:27:22 |  |
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