i am not arguing against the notion that there were egyptian influences that spread throughout the mediterranean. but this gets reduced and transformed to the point of meaningless when it is consolidated into something that has to have a definitive racial and geographical label placed on it.
what if the "African/black people" were "Africanish and blackish"? is the mediterranean basin of peoples so clear in its lines that you would want to use that marker? and was egypt, too, that clearly delineated? were the borders around egypt closed to other peoples?
the greeks were not "copiers" any more or less than other peoples. what the arabs did with greek philosophy was to preserve and transmit it, but also to transform it.
who did not do that? even the romans, arguably presented as mere copiers or greeks were anything but, as anyone who has read greek and roman tragedy could attest.
do you know about greek music? the modes that are asiatic as well as ionic or doric etc?
what about rock and roll? can you tell me it is black, white, american, british, etc? and that is only a blip in time
we need a more capacious view of culture, not one that is so reductive.
sorry to go on: but think about achebe, and just begin to describe what kinds of cultural metissages come together in his work.
ken
On 8/27/12 5:59 PM, Okechukwu Ukaga wrote:
" 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.... " -Ken Harrow
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.
ken
On 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"
--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
-- 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--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
--
Okechukwu Ukaga, MBA, PhD
Executive Director and Extension Professor,Northeast Minnesota Sustainable Development Partnership, University of Minnesota,114 Chester Park, 31 W. College Street, Duluth, MN 55812Phone: 218-341-6029 Fax: 218-726-7566Book Review Editor, Environment, Development and Sustainability
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Richard Buckminster Fuller
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
-- 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
No comments:
Post a Comment