you wrote;
>5.In most parts of the world,the conceptual and historical language
>of Western scholarship is the language of discourse. The race of the
>scholar or their geographical location is often irrelevant to this hegemony.
>
>6.Scholars in Benin,for example, are less likely to make the study
>and application of native Olokun aesthetics and hermeneutics their
>concern.Why bother when well developed systems are already imported
>and established from Euro-America? The fact that these
>Western hermeneutic systems began as studies of sacred literature
>and can therefore represent a stimulus to continue the development
>of the cognitive traditions represented by tradition from native
>hermeneutic models seems to be too much trouble for many
>particularly since Western imperialism has discredited those native
>models as anachronistic.
my sense is that the approach to a text is eventually generated in a
collaboration between the thinker, the text, and, indirectly the
interpretive discourses/theories that the thinker brings to the text.
in the early years of written african lit and cinema, those
interpretative discourses relied heavily upon readings generated from
western texts; but that wasn't totally bizarre; i read in many early
afr lit novels of the 50s overtones of voltaire's candide, not
surprisingly since the authors in question also cut their teeth on
voltaire and other french authors
but with time, the reading of african lit was built on the readings
of earlier african lit.
you might wish that i could take soyinka's myth literature and the
african world as a model on which to base my thinking.
we did that in those days; it helped us to read The Interpreters and
lots of other texts. now those readings strike me as programmatic,
forced, unconvincing. it isn't enough to evoke a mythology of yoruba
gods and read african lit through that optic, as though doing the
whole greek mythology thing to european lit as we did in the 50s and
60s. the time of joyce's ulysses is over, and with it the threads of
explanation.
we were looking for straight answers to texts whose richness lay,
still, in bending the light. the answers don't come from a culture,
from the heart of the truth in people's cultural and social
practices. it starts with words, and ends when it ceases to be
answers,but rather questions, more questions. i hope ikhide's
readings lead us that way when he expostulates against the notion of
one culture, one reading, one truth, one answer, one igboness, one
yorubaness, one americanness, one anythingness. it was never a one,
never will be a one; we are multiple, our creations in words and
collection acts are multiple.
ideally i would take some kind of baktinian approach that sees
discourses altered by the interactions, between texts and readers,
authors and texts, narrators and authors, etc. in the space between
where interactions are born, there the words come to life, and don't
stop as we go on discussing what we read.
western influences in this? yes, where? in each of us, more or less.
african influences, yes.
a dominance of western thought over african creation? only in the old
days, because that was how colonialism and imperialism functioned.
still true? maybe with the publishers; maybe with those who reach for
one simple answer: what is the real meaning of TFA? beyond that, i
think we are always fighting that dominance you cite since the
institutions that created it are still endebted to it.
an example: why is african lit usually taught in language depts that
are divided along the lines of european languages? why is nigerian
lit taught in an english dept? instead of an african dept? is all
nigerian lit written in english???
what of cameroon lit? which dept? whose cubbyhole does it belong to?
where does orature belong? all those questions were addressed by
mudimbe, and he is right, the elevators of thought are locked into
already given epistemologies. i am agreeing with you there.
but they too change, as do we, and there's the nub. i have read
african lit for 35 years, and it has replaced european lit in my
baggage. i can't read it as i would have otherwise, years ago; and
that means the critical approaches have been generated by that
change. that's why i resist these identity formations that insist on
a purely western or african approach. isn't this true for all of us?
we aren't the children of hegel, but of a mixture of thinkers, whom
we cite as they work for us. some more than others. i have written
about sembene's films for a very long time, increasingly in
resistance to what i view as his project.but even so, he is my point
of reference, when i think about african cinema. i don't need to go
to truffaut, i have sembene. he generated african cinematic theory by
creating a body of films that influenced us all.
ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
harrow@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
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