Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. By STEPHEN HOWE. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. x + 337. £22 (ISBN 1-85984-873-7); £15, paperback (ISBN 1-85984-228-3).

Stephen Howe's book is certainly, to date, the most comprehensive study on Afrocentrism. Its subtitle, Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, makes quite clear its object of analysis. Divided into three parts, it dwells successively on ancestors of the movement and their influences, the new visions heralded by its members and, finally, today's orientations of Afrocentrism. They are introduced by a systematic presentation of Afrocentrism as a concept and as a space in which one finds a multiplicity of trends. But let us suppose that there is such a thing as Afrocentrism entertained by ‘blacks’, ‘Afro-Americans’, and ‘African-Americans’, since Howe uses these terms interchangeably and which, as he puts it, would reproduce in some of its expressions what Walker Connor called ‘ethnonationalism’. In his introduction, Howe summarizes its complexity and predicaments. As a matter of fact, this introduction exposes Howe's positions about Afrocentrism.