2ND WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT
“Locating a Text: Implication of Afrocentric Theory” explains the philosophy
behind texts and stated its detailed description of how a serious reader can
actually gather a lot of information once it is judged from the eyes of the
author. Dr. Molefi Kete Asante did a great article to establish the two
fundamental realities location and dislocation, that is needed to identify the
situation of the text. In his article his main motive was to demonstrate that
multicultural literacy can lead to a critical transformation in the way we
approach. According to him to understand African American literature a reader
should be exposed to the cultural information eg: folk tales, Ebonics, barbee
shops , Hoodoo and Root rituals and etc, which may not be useful every time
but it definitely fulfills the aim to make them retrospect the multicultural
society.
In his article he first gives the readers a bunch of examples of famous
writings which are divided in a way to describe that Afrocentric literature is
affected when changes its location. It shows that it matter how a text nature
is, how it is presented, how it has own direction, its own language structure
and its own attitude of presentation. These examples lay the foundation of
what he proves in later part of his article that the location of the text is
described by majorly three things language, attitude and direction. These
elements when judged alone or in a combination give a sense of idea about
everything that is needed to know about the text and its author. When debating
about the author, one is judged by first on the terms of blackness, A
decapitated or a lynched text. An African American author who have tried to
“shed their race” are known to produce both kind of text. He explains that
Decapitated text is when author writes with no discernible African cultural
element or produces text placing himself outside his own historical experiences
and Lynched text is when they write according to cultural and historical
knowledge. According to his text the element of location in any text is defined
by ...
