Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: NigerianID | Introduce Chinese Language in Schools – Fashola

dear moses et al
i have a comment, and a question, concerning moses's decentering of
europe as the source of reason, its techniques, civilization, and
knowledge formation.
the comment is a small one, but it concerns the transmission to europe,
during the late middle ages and renaissance, of the texts of the ancient
world. those texts were translated and copies by the Islamic thinkers of
the medieval period; their elevation, particularly of aristotelian
thought and sciences, was part of the rationalist movement that marked
late medieval islam. islamic modernism might be thought to be the heir
of that intellectual movement.
islam comes in for a lot of bashing, but this historical footnotes
merits at least a nod.

as for my question, it concerns the terms "reason, civilization,
knowledge formation." can't we relativize, rethink those terms?
as i learned more about the african past, i came to understand that it
was european notions of civilization that led to the valuation of large
states, of their technological accomplishments, like large structures
and forms of literacy and literatures.
european values, built on the notion that "we have nations" and national
literatures etc etc, and only those people who built the giant
structures, as in zimbabwe, or the pyramids, or giant states like mali
and ghana, etc, merit the distinction of the term "civilization." the
rest was what? (in jewish terms, we'd say "chopped meat," meaning
nothing of importance.)
so i dutifully read Things Fell Apart, studied as much african art, and
then music, and religious thought, as i could so as to teach our African
Humanities course. i did what we all did.
and come to the firm conclusion that the measurements of civilization
delineated above were values produced by contemporary european states to
validate their own notions of what constituted history, culture,
civilization.
nothing counted more than learning how biased those notions were, even
after i had earned a ph d in studying western literatures, and quite
loved them.

people, we have to say no to all those views, and learn to start from a
different center if we are to erect values that don't defer to western
priorities from the outset. we have to rethink everything that defines
value.
that is not so hard, it simply takes the courage to say, it looks
different to me when i am standing here.
ok, that "different" doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath
water, but it means, learning to see the relative grounding of values,
and of learning that Things Fall Apart is important not for the little
lessons it teaches about the ethnocentrism of "mr. smith and mr. brown"
and the european colonizers, but the larger lesson that "civilization"
and "culture" are ensconced in all the delicate filiations of words,
gestures, movements, celebrated in achebe's verbal dance, in the songs
he sets in motion. learning that larger kingdoms produced cultural
creations, but so did "acephalous" states; that "history" was a term
deployed to crush the colonized, and compel them to set value only in
european accounts.
ken



On 11/25/12 9:49 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
> ," First, reason is a relative 'truth," notnot a universal. It is not
> the holy grail or the only holy grail of knowledge. Second, Europe did
> not invent reason and its techniques. The historical chronology and
> genealogy of civilization and knowledge formation does not begin in
> Western Europe. It begins rather from the East, the Near East, the
> Middle East and parts of Mediterranean world and made its way in a
> symbiotic diffusion first in classical antiquity to Greece and then to
> Rome, and then to Europe proper in the Middle Ages and the early
> modern periods. My critique of Negritude, or more precisely Senghor,
> is not to be taken as an endorsement of European and Eurocentric
> claims about progress and development.

--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
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