Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs related to Ugandans?

hi segun
of course i understand the feeling. if i were to submit musicians to the test of racism or anti-semitism, i'd never listen to wagner. i've heard irele singing wagner. we ignore his abominable thoughts, or those of many others, and take what is good.
that is not so easy. it isn't hegel alone who was racist. it was his whole era. europeans came to believe in their superiority as they asserted military rule and conquered other people. how often is it the case that conquerors believe in their superiority? why do we have an American Firster political candidate, trump, who is leading the pack??

as i said in the previous posting, othello could well be interpreted as racist, but i am not prepared to ditch shakespeare for all that. i would teach him, but try to explain his worldview in terms of the thinking of the time. same for hegel.
is it not a problem for us to be judging people from the past on the basis of our current ways of putting the world together, of making sense of the world?
that said, i must admit i have a hard time swallowing naipaul due to his conservative eurocentrist racist values. and there is much in conrad that is also highly distasteful. to be sure. not just in Heart of Darkness.
so, i can't always live up to my own advice!
ken

On 8/5/15 3:48 AM, Segun Ogungbemi wrote:

Ken,

I appreciate your view but it is really difficult to comprehend the logic of someone denigrating your race, identity, dignity, culture and pride and you give his work an intellectual handshake. I can't remember the exact date in 1979 as a postgraduate student at SMU Dallas, I was to read Hegel so I went to the  University Central Library to check out one of his books. I was initially exited and thrilled to  get one of his books. As I began to read some portions of the book and his idea of the Black race stirred me on the face, I lost interest in his work. Ken, since then I lost interest in whatever philosophical nonsense he wrote. 

As a philosopher Hegel should have used his knowledge of historical dialectic to remove his bias and ignorance of the race he never had intimate interaction with. 

There was a missionary who taught us in the Bible College in 1966. We noticed his racial attitude towards us in class and decided to boycott his class. Before the end of the academic year, he was sent back to wherever he came from in Europe or America or Canada. He was a very brilliant teacher but his posture was that of KKK. Did we throw away the baby and the bath water? Not at all, Ken. We simply threw away the racist and the bath water of racism. 

Prof. Segun Ogungbemi

On Aug 4, 2015, at 9:22 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

hi ogugua
i said something like, we teach him despite his racism. it becomes pretty limited to teach 19th c authors for how racist they were. to learn about the common assumptions about race in a period is important, to be sure, but not all there is to their work. heart of darkness, about the night of the soul, about how the colonialists plunged us into that deepest element of human brutality, to the point where the "civilized" people discovered that everything they thought about barbarians was actually in their own soul, world, history--that expands us far beyond the dumb simply reading of conrad as nothing but a racist. achebe makes an adequate argument that he was racist; but he fails to explicate the condemnation of colonialism and european values that the novella ultimately puts forth. i suggest, if anyone really cares, to read edward said's interpellation in this argument to get the argument i am making.
what possible use is there to bother with hegel's racism? or marx's? do we throw away the baby with the bath water? is their racism, which was largely the euro-view of their period, reason to reject their positions on how the spirit and history works in conflict, in dialectial struggle; the class issues; the epistemological readings? there is far too much that has no relationship to race to ignore.
rather we can say, they were limited in their views, but they also laid foundations for philosophical or political thought that we can still build upon. derrida's reading of the spirit, the ghost of marx, is invaluable.
 you ask if there is reason to read them despite their racism? i can't really believe it makes sense to throw away so much key work because of the flaws in other aspects, and not only those dealing with race. nor is race the only vector of importance in reading an author.

so, shakespeare's othello is problematic because of race; the merchant of venice because of anti-semitism. do i throw away all the rest??
similarly, armah's work is horribly anti-arab; do i throw away The Beautyful ones? what exactly is the point?
lastly, there is no soul to a writer; no bent.
i like barthes when we leads us, with foucault, to the notion of the death of the author. read the works, forget the author.
ken

On 8/4/15 6:37 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

 

Hello Ken,

 

"conrad's racism is not where we go when reading his novels"  Ken

 

Why not? Where do you go if I may ask? Is 'Heart of Darkness' one of the novels you refer to?

 

What does teach Conrad and Hegel "despite their racism" mean" Is an honest job teaching them likely if this is so?

o

I believe that one must enter a writer's soul if the one is to correctly and fully appreciate/understand  the writer. This to me, is why a writer's bent should not be ignored in reading them.

 

oa

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2015 1:20 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs related to Ugandans?

 

hi ogugua
first of all, when you publish something, you open yourself up to critique. we are free to criticize and evaluate the values/ideology of anyone whose material is public. publishing actually invites commentary. i think of it as sticking your head up above the surface: speak out, people can throw stones back.

secondly, in bekolo's film on mudimbe, mudimbe made a distinction between three orders of knowledge. one was myth--all people have myths that frame their understanding of the world. religions are an example.
secondly he identified public knowledge, ordinary, non-specialized common sense. more or less shared knowledge that enables us to live, to communicate with each other, to live in the world--a common understanding of the world.

third is disciplinary knowledge.

when i argued w you about the attitudes toward race in the academy, it was based only on my knowledge of contemporary scholars' work, on disciplinary knowledge. when i said, name the racists for me, i didn't imagine you would be going back to the past....
of course scholars, westerners, english, french, etc, were racists in the past.
so maybe, a more interesting question might be, when did that end, not did it characterize the work of hegel. more pertinently, when did the accepted truths of scholarship begin to exclude racist presuppositions?
that i don't know, but would guess that the shift began around the 1930s, at least with anthropology; around the 1950s with historians; that the major figures in history probably rewrote their discipline's basic assumptions somewhere around then.

as for literature, there are authors who are racist; but literary critics, by which i mean scholars, share a common worldview grounded in antiracism.
an author whom i consider racist is naipaul.
there is debate about exactly how we should read his work.
perhaps we could say the way that african literature is viewed by non-africanists generally reflects eurocentric values, i could buy that.
but, to put a cap on this, the racism of the 19th century, among the thinkers whom you cite, discredits their work. not all their work, but that portion of it. for instance, conrad's racism is not where we go when reading his novels; we teach them despite the racism; we teach kant, hegel, despite their racism. no one says, he is hegel, so let's accept his views on africa.

ken

On 8/2/15 3:10 AM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

Hello Ken,

I am not sure that it is appropriate for you or I to characterize any scholar- a learned person, expert in a specific area of study, as serious or not, for public consumption.  

I am also struggling to see that the boundaries you set up between the works of some scholars on the one hand, and ideology and public discourse on the other matters significantly, because quite oftentimes, ideology draws from the works of great minds some call scholars, and popular discourse draws from ideology, and not necessarily in the above other. The point is that they all can be part of the same cobweb.  What seems to be true also is that historical inferences and enduring public attitudes are formed based on them all.

As you may be aware, the systematic nature of European racism is much demonstrated in the racism (some say racist thoughts and works) of Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Mill- very influential Eurocentric thinkers who together, helped to concretize the tradition of modern philosophical racism which in many cases, sought to delegitimize Black Africa's contribution to world civilization, legitimized Africa's colonization, and helped to shape the systemic injustices based on race, that is practiced by some people of European descent.  

 

oa

 

 

 

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  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