Toyin
-- On 23 July 2010 19:12, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
to return to toyin's points:
you wrote;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
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.
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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