Yup! And as documented clearly in Black Athena, neither can you meaningfully talk about the Greek philosophers without the African/black people whose works were copied by the Greek scholars and transmitted to the Arabian scholars ....and then to medieval Europe, etc, etc.
-Okey
On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 1:55 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
scholarship is one thing, and culture another
my first impulse is to say two things: both culture and scholarship are reinvented continually. so they are always contemporary, and always being reinvented by streams of approaches to knowledge from various sources.
that said, there is a power component, or to use the correct term, power-knowledge, as foucault says, that always and invariably drives the dominant approach to scholarship. the institutions that produce what become dominant paradigms are marked by power-knowledge, and extend their tentacles and flows as far as those institutions have reach and dominion. thus the dominant approaches to literary criticism, for example, have been very heavily driven by what has become dominant in the western academy. 30 years ago bakhtin rose to the surface, and at one point althusser, lacan, derrida, etc etc. all these names came with a period, and then gradually faded or were replaced.
within african studies, 40 years ago irele, along with soyinka, 30 years ago mudimbe, chris miller, following the tracks of foucault, and said, and many others since, with names like mbembe now de rigeur, along with mamdani and diouf. shifting paradigms.
you can't meaningful place this within the very long term perspective that wants to look back to medieval academies, with the strong influence of islamic scholars; too much has intervened. i like putting the russian formalist bakhtin in there, as a break from so many other traditions, along with the influences of marx. and you can't meaningfully evoke islamic studies without greek philosophers whose works were translated by the arabic scholars, preserved, studied, and passed onto medieval european scholars, helping create scholasticism. then renaissance studies, and their influences. then enlightenment....
every attempt to place these traditions within the lines of present notions of the borders of africa, or europe, or asia, strike me as naive because they are imposing a contemporary epistemology and understanding of cultures and space on other times, peoples, and places. think how reductive it is to place st augustine into a cultural bag called africa, and consider that where he lived, when he lived, africa meant another land! did he live hippo regius, rome, algeria, african rome, christian north africa, christian rome? in the city of man? in the place he considered home, or where you would want to place him? wiki says his ancestors were berber, latin, phoenician. was he the product of his times, place, ancestors, all? how much?
you get my point. originary thought is really about something else, as glissant would say. not really about who comes from where.
kenOn 8/27/12 2:17 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:
In response to my essay 'What is Western Education?' a number of respondents on the Nigerian Biomedical and Life Sciences group argued, as was put must pungently by Aminu Shittu, that there is no such phenomenon as Western education because Western scholarship is an adaptation, even at times, an unacknowledged theft, of the achievements of the scholarship of Islamic civilization.
Another respondent on that group wondered if the roots of these streams of scholarship were not even older than Islamic civilization, reaching into Africa.
'What is the role of Africa in the development of modern scholarship?', is a question suggested by this perspective.
I would be pleased if anyone were to help throw light on this question of the pedigree of civilisations, with particular reference to traditions of scholarship.
thanks
Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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-- 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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