ABSTRACT
While returning to the theme concerning an Afro-Asian worldview and of research perceptions, this conclusion also highlights some of the most important claims on the subject based on the contributing authors’ findings. Overall, the Handbook reveals that a geopolitical reconceptualization of knowledge production is in fact occurring. This manifests in terms of the following dimensions: political, security, economic, development, environment, cultural, religious, societal, intellectual and academic interconnectedness between Africa and Asia. However, there are challenges that certainly can hinder the production of a common Afro-Asia worldview. According to Ali A. Mazrui (2013: xii), some of these challenges (religious, technological, economic and empire/political) are not new as they were at work in Africa long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The difference is that today these challenges, or forces as he calls them, are major engines of globalization and they are not weakening, they are just changing “hands”, from the West to the East in the reverse direction of Orientalism as Africa and Asia have been seeking to penetrate Western institutions to exert counterinfluence (ibid.: xxi). The problem as Mazrui points out is that though China and India are contributing towards further globalization in Africa, they also help to stem the tide of Westernization and Eurocentrism in African societies (ibid.). It seems that globalization is not contributing to balance African and Asian aspirations of a shared worldview.
