Transcendence in Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity and Tu Wei-ming’s Embodied Confucianism from the Perspective of Cultural Community

Abstract

The concept of cultural community has been firstly or more obviously embodied in the works of the minority/minoritized literature or writers from marginalized countries and approached from different perspectives, such as small and enduring spiritual bonds, aspiration and an ideal, or self-deconstruction due to heterogeneity, conflict, and difference. However, most researchers explore the cultural community in the works of merely one racial group, such as American Indian, Chinese, Korean, or African. There has been comparatively little research on the construction of a cultural community across races. Focusing on Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity and Tu Wei-ming’s embodied Confucianism, two cultural movements that fully embody a “new cosmopolitanism” and have the potential to dialog and complement each other, this study compares the views of transcendence of these two philosophies in terms of sense, the ultimate goal, orientation of time, vehicle for realization, and thinking pattern in the hope of the construction of a Sino-African cultural community, which reflects mutual understanding, coexistence, harmony without uniformity, and the contact, conflict, and intermingling of heterogeneous cultures.

Keywords

• cultural community
• new cosmopolitanism
• Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity
• Tu Wei-ming’s embodied Confucianism
• transcendence