All Yah’s Children: Emigrationism, Afrocentrism, and the Place of Israel in Africa

This article delineates the emigration story of the "African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem", a group of African Americans who left the United States for West Africa (and then "Northeast Africa") in the late 1960s. Their journey was predicated, I argue, on something similar to an Afrocentric sensibility, a mixture of Marcus Garvey-esque calls for an African-centered politics and claims about an ontological African alterity, the same intellectual claims that were just beginning to get codified in the American academy by scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante. I maintain that these "African Hebrew Israelites" represent a complicated kind of Afrocentrism, a Hebraicized version that does (and does not) conform to certain canonized renditions of Afrocentric thinking. Moreover, their conceptions of "the body" help to further explain their purposeful omission from broader discussions about Afrocentricity and its historical/institutional relationship to other varieties of African-centered counter-discourse. Adapted from the source document.