I

The late Nigerian-American novelist and literary critic Isidore Okpewho's novel Call Me By My Rightful Name is a fascinating literary curio. Targeted towards a youth audience, the novel was published in 2004 by Trenton, New Jersey's minor Africa World Press, but then quickly disappeared into relative obscurity. Though well intentioned, the book is marred by a somewhat didactic tone and a fanciful supernatural plot device that prompted Nigerian writer and critic Chuma Nwokolo, Jr. to derisively remark, "[M]emories do not flow in the bloodline...in spite of...Call Me By My Rightful Name, in which a young African American receives traumatic abduction memories from a Yoruba ancestor."
           
Bearing Nwokolo, Jr.'s criticism in mind, I propose that Call Me By My Rightful Name is a beautiful misfire that constitutes Okpewho's flawed yet engaging attempt to strike a pedagogical intervention in youth-oriented American popular culture. Specifically, in crafting a pedagogical allegory that probes African-American identity and its historical connection to African culture, Okpewho falls victim to the paradoxes associated with Afrocentrism, which can either fail on the level articulated by black historian Clarence Walker, who characterizes it as "Eurocentrism in blackface" (Walker, “PLATFORM”),¹ or succeed on the level promised by black scholar George Sefa Dei,² who sees it as a means of correcting Western-centric pedagogy. As I intend to persuade readers, Call Me By My Rightful Name is worthy of resurrection for popular culture pedagogical purposes, for the text can be repurposed to shed light on both the perils and promise associated with Afrocentrism.

II
           
We first encounter the novel's young black protagonist, Otis Hampton, in 1964 Boston, Massachusetts. Born into a culturally conservative, upper-middle-class, African-American family, Otis has just turned twenty-one and is comfortably – if somewhat indifferently – enrolled at Bradley University where he is the popular MVP of the school's basketball team. Our initial impression of Otis is that he is content with a life that finds him divorced from an awareness of his African heritage. In the novel's first chapter, for example, he finds himself at a party where he is surrounded by consumable goods, which reinforce his ensconcement within the mainstream American popular culture of the era: "His teammates have put a party together for him in a private residence in Cambridge.... Kentucky Fried. Miller's, Bud" (3).³

Immersed within this culture of Americana, Otis stands in sharp contrast to his girlfriend, Norma, a Radcliffe sociology student and aspiring black activist, for he seems curiously disengaged with the civic and racial discord that is engulfing his country. Estranged from the burgeoning civil rights activism of his era, Otis expresses no interest in Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the wider black consciousness movement that was then compelling many American students to challenge the Euramerican foundation of their nation's educational establishment. As a psychosocially transformed Otis will later come to reflect, his university offers "not one" course "devoted specifically to Africa" (249).
           
The journey that will ultimately give birth to Otis's psychosocial transformation is sparked by a series of violent, convulsive seizures he begins having in the wake of his twenty-first birthday. These seizures are triggered by the stimulus of African drum music and language. The most notable of them occurs at Pleasure Island, a Caribbean restaurant to which Otis accompanies Norma in order to meet the Jamaican Mr. Barrett, nicknamed "Guinea Man," whom she is interviewing for a project on the maroon of Jamaica. Thrown into spasms at the sound of African-accentuated music being played on the restaurant's audio system, Otis chants in a seemingly indecipherable languauge that Norma happens to catch on audiotape. Concerned about Otis in the wake of this incident, Norma plays the tape for Otis's father, who enlists the help of Dr. Fishbein, a liberal-minded white psychiatrist known for his charitable ties to Boston's black community.

In positioning Fishbein as Jewish American, Okpewho draws an inclusionary allusion to the now often overlooked role that Jewish Americans played in the black American civil rights struggle. Considering Okpewho's evident Afrocentric leanings, this notion of an intentional allusion seems especially plausible from a rhetorically defensive standpoint since Afrocentrism has long faced accusations of anti-Semitism. Writing in a damning 1992 New York Times editorial entitled "Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars" for example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. quotes Dr. John Henrik Clarke, whom he calls "the paterfamilias of the Afrocentric movement," as identifying multiculturalism as a product of "the Jewish educational mafia" (qtd. in Gates, Jr.).   
             
With such criticisms in mind, it seems plausible to speculate that Okpewho employs Fishbein to underscore that he is in no way advocating any form of Afrocentrist doctrine that is anti-Semitic. Proving of invaluable assistance to the Hampton family, Fishbein diagnoses Otis as suffering from "recitative xenoglossy" (58), a supposed condition that compels individuals to speak in languages that are entirely unknown to them. Identified by the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology as a pseudo-scientific condition, xenoglossia is defined as "a facility claimed by some spirit mediums, clairvoyants, and other psychics to speak in languages that they have never learnt" (Colman 820). Here we witness Okpewho invoking paranormal issues that have long been easy targets for critics of Afrocentrism, who have aligned it with unsubstantiated knowledge claims that have compelled some academics to unfairly reject the movement as a whole. Writing in their book African History: A Very Short Introduction, for example, the historians John Parker and Richard Rathbone note that much of Afrocentric history is "wild polemic" that is "deeply flawed on empirical grounds" and "marginal to the mainstream academic study of African history" (38).

III
           
By incorporating this paranormal plot development within his novel, Okpewho comes perilously close to endorsing a form of racial-ethnic essentialism. Specifically, by having Otis uncover a personally repressed system of innate ancestral memories that are triggered by the mere stimulus of African language and music, Okpewho gives the impression of endorsing an essentialist-driven notion of African identity that revolves around a quasi-Jungian notion of a collective African unconscious.⁴ Viewed from a phenomenological, social constructivist standpoint, such a conception of cultural identity is, of course, inherently problematic, for as the philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre famously observed, "existence precedes essence" (29). In other words, subjects are born into the world devoid of any intrinsic sense of social or cultural being, and it is only through the extended process of one's interaction with their specific sociocultural environment that they begin to define their sense of identity.
           
When Fishbein is unable to determine the language that Otis is speaking in during his chants, he consults with two Boston-based linguists, the latter of whom hypothesizes that Otis is speaking a variation of Yoruba. Referred by this authority to Professor Baldwin, a white anthropologist who specializes in Yoruba language and culture, Fishbein advises Otis's father to visit this Berkeley-based academic in the hopes that he might shed light on Otis's case. Yet while Baldwin proves kind and passionate about his field, he is also somewhat of a fetishist for all things African, whose tendency towards academic immodesty – "I was appointed Oluwe. That means King of Books or Master of Learning" (62) – evokes Afrocentric scholar Molefi Asante's blunt yet salient observation that whites who operate within the field of African studies are often "off...on humility" (Asante 19).⁵ Indeed, despite fancying himself a leading voice on Yorubaland after having spent a total of "seven years" amongst the Yoruba people (62), Baldwin proves unable to decipher Otis's chanting, and thus refers the case to Bolaji Alabi, a Nigerian scholar associated with an African Studies program at Northwestern University.
           
Although minor characters, Baldwin and Alabi nonetheless fulfill important narrative roles, for Okpewho harnesses Alabi to highlight Baldwin's apparent shortcomings as a supposed expert on Yorubaland affairs, thereby alluding to the reductive forms of analysis that many anthropologists have often applied to African cultures and languages. The fact that Baldwin uses a transcription machine to capture Otis's words from tape seems symbolic of the clinical, detached manner with which Western anthropologists have often approached the dynamic issue of non-Western languages. In sharp contrast to Baldwin, the Nigerian-born Alabi, who has been immersed within Yoruba culture from his birth onwards, notes that he is able to "hear a number of words a little better than they have been represented in the transcript" (67). Whereas Baldwin's familiarity with Yoruba is narrowly confined to its Oyo vernacular, Alabi – as "a home grown indigene” (68) – is familiar with the nuances of various Yoruba dialects. In essence, one senses that Okpewho positions Alabi to exemplify the type of scholar of African languages that he endorses. Possessing extensive formal academic training as well as a lifetime of experiential immersion in Yoruba culture, Alabi has “both a native ear for dialectical differences and... training as a linguist" (68). 
           
According to Alabi, the dialect of Yoruba that Otis speaks during his chants originates from the Etiki, whom he identifies as "an ethnic subgroup in northeastern Yorubaland" (72). Motivated by Alabi's findings, Otis departs for Nigeria in the company of his father and Fishbein. Upon his arrival, he finds himself drawn to the village of Ijoko Odo, which is located on the outskirts of the city Ikere in the state of Etiki. Here, in a densely wooded area, Otis uncovers the origin of his seizures, which emanate from his great-grandfather Akimbowale, who three generations before was seized from this very spot by slavers while reciting a chant to commemorate the burial of his father. While Otis never definitively states that he believes he is the reincarnation of Akimbowale, he clearly leaves the door open to this possibility.

As critic Adetayo Alabi notes in his article "On Seeing Africa for the First Time: Orality, Memory, and the Diaspora in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name," "Yoruba culture believes in reincarnation," which helps explain why the elderly twins, Kehinde and Taiwo, accept Otis as their long-deceased brother, Akimbowale, upon noting the marked resemblance to him (148). Problematically, however, Okpewho couches this plot development against the backdrop of Fishbein's pseudo-scientific ruminations, which he attempts to legitimize via a manipulatively deployed footnote that cites Ian Stevenson's essay "The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations":

He [Fishbein] has often agreed with psychologists who dismiss these specters of ancestral and other memory – previous lives, their later reincarnations, memories passed on from one existence to the next – as irrational myths, encouraged by pseudoscientific forays into primitive religion, that have no place in the more serious science of neurological medicine. But now he finds himself faced with the question: Have we been wrong all along, applying Western rationalist paradigms to cases occurring in cultures or systems different from our own? Of recent works on the subject, he recalls especially Ian Stevenson’s prize-winning essay of 1961. Fishbein read it then with qualified faith, like most of his colleagues. Now, Stevenson’s argument makes more sense to him than it once did. He still needs to apply tests of “paranormal cognition” to establish Otis’s previous life in this community. But now, he thinks, there may well be more to human life than “science” has prepared him for. (133)

Although an ethical researcher, the late Stevenson is today virtually discredited, as evidenced by his mentioning in The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience.

Likely to alienate more literal-minded readers, this particular plot point reeks of the worst perils of Afrocentrism via its association with blatant pseudoscience. Granted, in fairness to Okpewho, he may simply have been attempting to be true to the zeitgeist of the early 1960s. Paranormal research was briefly legitimized as a form of scientific inquiry during this period before being abandoned due to inconclusive results.  Nonetheless, Okpewho clearly would have been better off confining his novel's emphasis on reincarnation to the realm of magical realism rather than attempting to lend "scientific" credence to his acts of creative whimsy.

 
IV
           
Echoing the grand European literary tradition of the Bildungsroman or novel of education, Call Me By My Rightful Name takes narrative shape around a formally tripartite structure that reflects Otis's psychosocial growth and development. That his journey of self-discovery is ignited in the first section of the book on the eve of his twenty-first birthday is seemingly indicative of the younger American readership that Okpewho is targeting. In America, the age of twenty-one is generally regarded as heralding the official transition to adulthood, in which liquor consumption – the last rite of passage – is legally sanctioned. As we shall later learn, twenty-one also turns out to be the age at which Otis's great-grandfather was enslaved (152). Focused chiefly on Otis's life in America, this first section of the novel lays the groundwork for developments in its second section, in which Otis journeys to Africa and begins to uncover his ancestral roots, thereby paving the way for its third section, in which he immerses himself in Yorubaland culture and reflects on his American and African (Nigerian) experiences in quasi-dialectical fashion: "I've had to concede that the best that I can do is try to figure out which of the two images of myself is the me before I came here and which is the me that I am now...I need to figure out how to reconcile the two images and be the person I'm supposed to be" (203).

Notably, the novel's third section also registers a transition to a first-person narration and unfolds in epistolary format, thereby further underscoring the extended process of individuation Otis undergoes, which will culminate with his decision to adopt the name of his forebearer – Akimbowale. Sadly, however, this third section also heralds a transition to a particularly didactic pedagogical style that unfolds as Otis details the intricacies of Yorubaland culture and the tumultuous state of independence-era Nigerian politics, while simultaneously ruminating on such American events as the rise of Malcolm X and the assassinations of such key civil rights-era figures as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.  In delineating these events via Otis's perspective, Okpewho adopts a discernibly Afrocentric worldview that seems particularly targeted towards younger readers, who have historically been exposed to Euramerican interpretations of history and culture. By alluding to the Nigerian writers J.F. Ondunjo (211), Chinua Achebe (211), and Wole Soyinka (213), as well as such noted African Americans as Duke Ellington (169), Miles Davis (169), John Coltrane (169), Billie Holliday (169), Sonny Rollins (169), Charlie Parker (209), Stokely Carmichael (250), and W.E.B. Du Bois (253), Okpewho presumably hoped his readers would research these figures and learn more about the historic contributions that Africans and African Americans alike have made to international culture.
           
To this end, the sociologist and writer Du Bois, though only briefly alluded to by Otis, is a figure of notable importance in Call Me By My Rightful Name. As Otis writes in a letter to his black American friend Chip, who has been residing in Nigeria prior to his arrival, "I recently came across an essay by W.E.B. Du Bois where he talks about the double consciousness of black people in America" (253). Otis refers to Du Bois's 1897 essay "Strivings of the Negro People," which was later republished with revisions as part of Du Bois's 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. In this now famous essay, Du Bois outlines his notion of double consciousness as follows:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. (Du Bois)

Written when he was twenty-nine years old, the essay is reflective of a younger Du Bois, whose interest in Africa would later expand substantially. As historian Mia Bay notes in her article "The Historical Origins of Afrocentrism," it was actually Du Bois who coined the term "Afro-centric" during the early 1960s in relation to his desire to create an Encyclopedia Africana, "which was to center around Africa" (502). This was, of course, during a point in history when the formal academic study of Africa was still in its infancy. As Kevin Shillington points out in his book History of Africa, "The study of African history came of age in the 1950s, coinciding with the emergence of many newly-independent modern African states" (xiii).
           
Considered in relation to the novel's Bildungsroman format, the Du Boisian notion of double consciousness is resolved via Otis's journey to his ancestral homeland. By synthesizing his American and African experiences, Otis is able to return to America as the psychosocially transformed Otis Akimbowale who has integrated his American identity with his ancestral roots, thereby emerging an African American in the truest sense of the term.  As critic Brenda Cooper persuasively argues in her article "The Rhetoric of a New Essentialism Versus Multiple Worlds: Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name and Buchi Emecheta's The New Tribe in Conversation," Okpewho's novel "operates on the level of the symbolic, the spiritual, and the metaphorical, rather than within the flesh and blood of the everyday and its concrete objects and bodies" (26).

Bearing Cooper's argument in mind, one can better appreciate the novel's overall allegorical significance. In emphasizing Otis's fanciful process of memory recovery, Okpewho underscores the enforced historical amnesia experienced by the African-American descendants of those early enslaved Africans who were literally stolen from their continental homeland. By means of a narrative that sees Otis reside in Ijoko Odo so that he can master the Oyo dialect and complete the unfinished chant that his great-grandfather Akimbowale had made three generations earlier, Okpewho suggests that Otis heals himself by reclaiming his ancestral history through orality. Ultimately, by living in the communal environment of Ijoko Odo, Otis awakens not just his sense of African historical consciousness, but also his sense of civic responsibility as an African American, for in returning to America he assumes an engaged role as a "peaceful" (252) activist in the nation's burgeoning civil rights struggles.

As Otis notes, a key goal of his newfound activism is to "overhaul the American higher education system to reflect the history and culture of black peoples and the contributions they've made to the growth of American society...and mankind" (249). Obviously underscoring Okpewho's own Afrocentric pedagogical ambitions, Otis's activist goals are historically grounded in America's Black Student Movement of the 1960s. Indeed, Call Me By My Rightful Name concludes in 1966, roughly one year before Cornell University created America's first functioning Afro-American Studies program in 1967, which was followed by San Francisco State College's establishment of America's first Afro-American Studies Department in 1968 (Cole 23). Chronicling the historical significance of these events in her article "Black Studies in Liberal Arts Education," black American anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole notes, "Intimately tied to the Black Student Movement, and fueled by the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movement, Black Studies is fundamentally a critique of educational institutions in American society and a set of proposals for beginning the long and difficult process of change in those institutions" (23).   

V
           
Its evident good intentions aside, however, Call Me By My Rightful Name betrays some notable Afrocentric pitfalls. First, keeping in mind Nwokolo, Jr.'s previously outlined critique that "memories do not flow in the bloodline," one can appreciate how the novel often comes close to endorsing the problematic notion that black "authenticity" can only be found via direct identification with Africa. Second, Okpewho's pseudoscientific invocation of "recitative xenoglossy" (58) and his apparent attempt to "scientifically" legitimize reincarnation leaves his text open to critics of Afrocentrism, who have unfairly dismissed the field as a whole by focusing on its fringe practitioners, who have engaged in irresponsible scholarship. Finally, in stressing the accomplishments of various African and African-American artists and intellectuals, Okpewho has little to say about the role of black women, African or otherwise. This last issue is, of course, a notable one, for patriarchal bias has long permeated certain strains of Afrocentrism. In his book An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance, for example, Molefi Asante problematically aligns feminism with a "Eurocentric worldview" (8). Norm R. Allen critiques this very aspect of Asante's book in his blistering review, "The Problem with Afrocentricity: Part I." More work needs to be done in this critical area.
           
Yet if there are numerous perils associated with Afrocentricism, then there is also immense promise, as exemplified by the following illuminating comments from George Sefa Dei, who sees Afrocentrism as a means of correcting the racist biases that have historically plagued much Western scholarship and pedagogy: "The learning I acquired during various phases of my education least emphasized the achievements and contributions of African peoples. It has been an education that has, for the most part, not cultivated our self-esteem and pride as Africans" (3). By adopting a discernibly Afrocentric perspective in focusing on Otis's process of memory recovery, Okpewho highlights the historical amnesia experienced by many diasporic Africans while simultaneously educating readers about both African and African-American history and culture.   

In the end, the best justification for responsible, historically-informed Afrocentricism perhaps comes from Stuart Hall, the late, great black British-Jamaican cultural scholar of roots and routes. Writing in his article "Negotiating Caribbean Identities," Hall focuses on the empowering metaphorical and symbolic attachments that many blacks come to feel in relation to Africa: "And the point was not that some people, a few, could only live with themselves and discover their identities by literally going back to Africa – though some did, often not with great success – but that a whole people symbolically [emphasis added] re-engaged with an experience which enabled them to find a language in which they could retell and appropriate their own histories" (36-37).

Building on Hall's comments, I would add that we are all, in a sense, African, for as Kevin Shillington notes, "Africa is the origin not only of the human species itself, but also of many of the more important technological innovations developed in the ancient world of early human prehistory" (1). In this regard, Okpewho's novel, flawed though it may be, still has much to offer us all when it comes to recognizing how the African past has, indeed, been prologue to the present.⁶

Notes

1. See Walker's excellent book We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism.

2. Ruminating on his own Western education in his article "Afrocentricity: A Cornerstone of Pedagogy," Dei notes, "Euramerican education continues to distort, misappropriate, and misinterpret many African people's lives and experiences" (3).

3. Alluding to American cultural imperialism in his book Globalization and American Popular Culture, scholar Lane Crothers writes, "The popularity of American cultural products derives, at least in part, from the transparency and flexibility they embody. In creating works to satisfy an American audience, U.S. producers learned to appeal to a broader audience. They also grew into powerful companies that could take economic advantage of global economic and political changes to build a worldwide market for their goods. This business synergy made American products attractive around the world" (220).

4. As noted in the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, Jung's conception of the "collective unconscious" was also called the "racial unconscious" and was "assumed by Jung to be inherited and transpersonal, and, in his conceptualization, to consist of the evolution of our species" (Reber 130).

5. It can be assumed that Okpewho is familiar with Asante and his work given that he refers to him in his Introduction to the 1999 anthology The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (xvii). Although I recognize the basic validity of Asante's claim, Asante has come under fire from numerous critics who have questioned his scholarship. In his book Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History, for example, critic and religious scholar Damian Thompson notes that Asante makes a glaring error in his book The History of Africa, in which he employs the Egyptian word Kemet for ancient Egypt, "explaining that it meant 'land of the blacks' or 'the black country'" (66). As Thompson proceeds to point out, this is a blatant distortion of history: "In fact, it meant only the latter and in a restricted sense: kemet (black) refers to the fertile soil, as opposed to deshret (red), the desert. Asante is implying that the Egyptians defined themselves in terms of their skin colour, which is not true" (66).  

6. I am, of course, here riffing on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Antonio remarks, "Whereof what's past is prologue" (2.1.278).

Works Cited

Alabi, Adetayo. "On Seeing Africa for the First Time: Orality, Memory, and the Diaspora in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name." Research in African Literatures, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009, pp. 145-155.

Allen, Jr., Norm R. "The Problem with Afrocentricity: Part I." A Book Review. Polity Press, 2007, p.1.

Asante, Moelfi. An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance. Polity Press, 2007.

---. "Where Is the White Professor Located?" Perspectives on History, 1 Sept. 1993, historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-1993/where-is-the-white-professor-located.

Bay, Mia. "The Historical Origins of Afrocentrism." Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2000, pp. 501-512.

Cole, Johnetta B. "Black Studies in Liberal Arts Education." The Black Studies Reader. Routledge, 2004, pp. 21-23.

Colman, Andrew M. "Xenoglossia." Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. Oxford UP, 2006, p. 820.

Cooper, Brenda. "The Rhetoric of a New Essentialism Versus Multiple Worlds: Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name and Buchi Emecheta's The New Tribe in Conversation." Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2007, pp. 19-36.

Crothers, Lane. Globalization and American Popular Culture. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Dei, George Sefa. "Afrocentricity: A Cornerstone of Pedagogy." Anthropology and
Education Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3-28.

Du Bois, W.E.B. "Strivings of the Negro People." Atlantic, August 1897, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. "Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars." New York Times, 20 July 1992, nytimes.com/1992/07/20/opinion/black-demagogues-and-pseudo-scholars.html.

Hall, Stuart. "Negotiating Caribbean Identities." New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, edited by Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl, U of West Indies P, 2001, pp. 24-39.

Mole, Phil. "Reincarnation" The Skeptic's Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, vol. 1, edited by Michael Shermer, ABC-CLIO, 2002, pp. 204-208.

Nwokolo, Jr., Chuma. “The Borders of Ruin – Chuma Nwokolo," 2006, nwokolo.com/journey.htm.

Okpewho, Isidore. Call Me By My Rightful Name. Africa World Press, 2004.

---. Introduction. The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, edited by Isidore Okpewho, Carol Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui, Indiana UP, 2001, pp. xi-xxviii.

Parker, John and Richard Rathbone. African History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2007.

Reber, Arthur S. and Emily S. “Collective Unconscious.” The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. Penguin Books, 2001, p. 130.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism." Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, edited by Stephen Priest, pp. 20-57.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. C. 1610-1611. Barron's Educational Series, 2002.

Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. 1989. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Thompson, Damian. Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History. Penguin, 2008.

Walker, Clarence. "PLATFORM: Invented Tradition." Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1991, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-05-20-me-1346-story.html.

---. We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. Oxford UP,
2001.