For decades, Swahili culture and society have been mischaracterized as an extension of Arabic cultural development. Within the last few decades scholars like Thomas Spear, Derek Nurse, and Chapurukha M. Kusimba have challenged Arabcentric and Eurocentric reductionist notions regarding the development of Swahili society. This dissertation traces the discourse of the historiographic discourse of Swahili culture and its impact on the way that the Swahili people, culture, and language are conceptualized. Furthermore, the research presented here is not solely focused on the material evidence of the development of African communities on the Swahili coast, but also on the ethical and cultural foundations of Bantu society manifested within Swahili society. The African ethics manifested in early Swahili society which still exists today illustrate a more nuanced understanding of the Africanity of coastal communities. As demonstrated by the traditional saying of Swahili communities, select folktales, and the construction of philosophical terminology, the ethics and cultural values of an African cultural paradigm. This idea of the essentiality of the African cultural paradigm to the foundation and development of Swahili culture is evidenced by the cross-cultural analysis of Swahili historical and cultural phenomena to other African communities. / African American Studies

“Africological Reconceptualization of the Epistemological Crises in Postcolonial Studies” aims at investigating the epistemological problems and theoretical inconsistencies in contemporary post-colonial studies. Capitalizing the Afrocentric theories of location, agency, and identity developed by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, this research takes Afrocentricity beyond the Africological analysis of African phenomenon and demonstrates its applicability in resolving issues that concern human liberation irrespective of race, class, gender, and nationality. To do so, this project juxtaposes the theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak with the Afrocentric theories of Molefi Asante and Ama Mazama, and demonstrates that the application of Afrocentric methods can help answering severe allegations against postcolonialism raised by a number of critics from within the school itself. Issues concerning spatial and temporal location of the term post-colonial, commodity status of post-colonialism, and crises in the post-colonial pedagogy can be addressed from an Afrocentric perspective based on a new historiography. To support the proposed arguments, the paper provides an Afrocentric analysis of some postcolonial works and shows how the very radical stance of postcoloniality has been neutralized by the Western academy. Simultaneously, the research also shows, despite being ridiculously disparaged as essentialist and racist, Afrocentricity is fundamentally radical and quintessentially emancipatory in its relentless fight against misrepresentation, pseudoscience, and injustice in the name of objective scholarship perpetrated by Eurocentric intellectuals—particularly from Asia and Africa. / African American Studies

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map. / African American Studies

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