misrepresentations cut both ways. so do representations cut both ways.
the first mistake is always to misunderstand what is entailed in representation, and the guidebook for explaining how representation works as does discourse, and can be subject to discursive analysis, to cultural analysis of discourse, is stuart hall's Representation.
secondly, if the sad long history of european-african relations has been marked and marred by european misrepresentations, it is really no different from european representations. the more we understand that, the more we understand that the representations come from SOMEWHERE, not nowhere, not pure phenomenological observations, not some putative objective non-standard epistemology, the more we should understand that it "cuts both ways," that europeans too are constructed in the african gaze.
not seen for who they are, but constructed.
when toundi stands by that door, in Une vie de boy, looking on as the whites are chatting foolishly about their africans, he is "seeing" a set of europeans much as they "see" and don't see him.
only when you inflect power into this exchange of gazes, and ask whose versions get to be purveyed, and why, do we begin to make progress.
adichie never gets to the point of recognizing that that version of the Single Story, whose exposure has been so widely celebrated, is also a single story itself--and not about mexicans, but her harvard roommate types.
ken
p.s. "begs the questions" means the opposite of how it is used below. why is that misuse so common nowadays farooq?
please stop it from taking over the world, i beg
But misrepresentation can cut both ways. In her lecture, Adichie admitted to herself holding a similarly parodying story, not about Americans, but about Mexicans, her understanding of whom was both formed and tainted by United States popular media. In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Westerners who donate to African causes are typified as exclusively white and patronising, while the West is a multi-racial domain with a few enlightened minds. It happens elsewhere, too, like in Amma Darko's Beyond the Horizon, published in 1995, which depicts Europe as a demoralising death trap of the soul for any African who attempts to live there. The immigrant experience may entail, increasingly, a galaxy of exhausting and sometimes fatal challenges, but it is not exclusively that. There are success stories everywhere.
All of this begs the question: Is it right to ask artists to run through a checklist of politically correct indicators before publishing their work? Or are partial truths of one kind acceptable if they lead to greater truths of another? And if conflict drives story, should some conflicts, like the Rhodesian war or resource exploitation and poverty in the Niger Delta, be off limits because they don't tell the whole story of their true-life settings? Or does the real question, once we exclude actively racist art, have more to do with the receiving audiences, who, in forming impressions of the world, must seek out a variety of stories?
-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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