A Critique of Monist Afrocentrism in Toni Morrison's "Paradise‪"‬

In rewriting her people’s history in "Paradise", Morrison touches upon the issue of Afrocentrism as a cornerstone in the social, political and cultural understanding of black America. Her steadfast interest in black peoples’ lives and destinies may be read as a self-evident concern with Afrocentrism. Both her literary art and cultural criticism overlap, in one way or another, with moderate forms of Afrocentrism.

First coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in the early 1960s then popularised by Asante a couple of decades later, the term Afrocentrism represents a talking back against the hegemonic attitudes and discourses that have been disfiguring and marginalising the African Americans’ cultural legacies and historical realities both before and after the Transatlantic Passage.