Despite increased interest in recent years in the role of race in Western culture, scholars have neglected much of the body of work produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by black intellectuals. For example, while DuBois' thoughts about Africa may be familiar to contemporary academics, those of his important precursors and contemporaries are not widely known. Similarly, although contemporary figures such as Martin Bernal, Molefi Assante, and other "Afrocentrists" are the subject of heated debate, such debates are rarely illuminated by an awareness of the traditions that preceded them. Race and The Writing of History redresses this imbalance, using Bernal's Black Athena and its critics as an introduction to the historical inquiries of African-American intellectuals and many of their African counterparts. Keita examines the controversial legacy of writing history in America and offers a new perspective on the challenge of building new historiographies and epistemologies. As a result, this book sheds new light on how ideas about race and racism have shaped the stories we tell about ourselves.

This innovative work offers the first comprehensive transcultural history of historiography. The contributors transcend a Eurocentric approach not only in terms of the individual historiographies they assess, but also in the methodologies they use for comparative analysis. Moving beyond the traditional national focus of historiography, the book offers a genuinely comparative consideration of the commonalities and differences in writing history. Distinguishing among distinct cultural identities, the contributors consider the ways and means of intellectual transfers and assess the strength of local historiographical traditions as they are challenged from outside. The essays explore the question of the utility and the limits of conceptions of modernism that apply Western theories of development to non-Western cultures. Warning against the dominant tendency in recent historiographies of non-Western societies to define these predominantly in relation to Western thought, the authors show the extent to which indigenous traditions have been overlooked. The key question is how the triad of industrialization, modernization, and the historicization process, which was decisive in the development of modern academic historiography, also is valid beyond Europe. Illustrating just how deeply suffused history writing is with European models, the book offers a broad theoretical platform for exploring the value and necessity of a world historiography beyond Eurocentrism.