If I were African, I would call myself African.
But I would know the difference between a wolof person and a serer.
And I wouldn't pretend we had some fundamental cultural ties, as if there were a divine or historical mandate.
On the other hand, I would definitely look for where the history was a shared one, and begin from that to look for commonalities.
I have said this often enough before: our list is filled with historians who know well the way the history played out, and despite some common elements of colonialism, it wasn't the same everywhere; it wasn't the same before the Europeans came in 150 yrs ago, it wasn't the same when they left in the 1960s, it isn't the same now.
We can use African comfortably when referring to the larger geography, but to pretend that the culture or thought is somehow generalized across the continent makes no sense.
Even ali Mazrui had his broad divisions, and within those, of course, there were many many more.
Maybe there is another way to think about it where we can come closer together. In terms of current economic and political structures, within the larger scope of neoliberalism and global politics, there are many common interests that should reflect a common front, more or less. I could see a good reason to seek African responses, broadly, to the question of how to respond to the world bank, to the EU, to China, to the US, etc.
There is, after all, a notional concept of the political unity in the African Union. And there are real economic unions, especially in the south with NEPAD
There is yet another way to approach this question, which is more complicated and would take too long for me to do more than mention. The notions of Negritude are largely historical, not taken seriously today. However, when irele laid out its history, nd especially when Diawara wrote about senghor's ideas as reflected in contemporary African cinema, then their readings breath real life into the concept. It isn't race that underlies diawara's readings, but senghor's philosophy, and he makes the most compelling case I;ve seen.
On the other hand, when one reads mbembe's latest historical account of race, it is so ugly one wants to do nothing but excise the words that denote race from our vocabulary, so much are the infused with the ugly slave trade and plantation systems that gave rise to them and their usage. Race created a commonality, a fraught one, and I would want to evoke paul gilroy's notion on how we can combat the racism in the west or the u.s. by what Spivak calls strategic essentialism. As long as we recognize it is strategic, it is necessary.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday 29 April 2018 at 20:34
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
Ken,
What should current Africans call themselves? Abibimans?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 29/04/2018 15:32 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (harrow@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info
Biko, I never asserted Europe was culturally monolithic. Not sure why you asserted that. As for my permission to voice my views, why would you say no one is asking for it. What that means is, I should keep my views to myself….
Well, …honi soit qui mal y pense.
Lastly, not all criticism is constructive, or well grounded. It would be unreasonable to accept it simply because it is voiced.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 28 April 2018 at 19:35
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
Ken
Africa is culturally diverse but Europe is not culturally monolithic either. You assume a cultural unity in Europe just as Diop assumed a cultural unity in Africa. Unity does not mean uniformity nor unanimity, a little goes a long way, said Cabral.
You may not like the idea of centering the Africana paradigm on the contributions, experiences, and struggles of people of African descent but no one is asking for your permission to define the paradign in a field that you do not share.
However, I agree with you that Derrida is relevant to the centered and critical scholar-activism paradigm valued in Africana Studies though many in the field unfairly reject him as Eurocentric. He himself gave credit to his African cultural experiences and struggles for the emergence of the questions that preoccupied him and he privileged Africa in his scholar-activism.
Enjoy the authors you love but do not dismiss other authors without a shred of evidence against them except that they are classics that many still find relevant today.
Good to know that you disagree with Spivak on her rhetorical question that implied that the subaltern was dumb. And yes, I am familiar with her 1999 book which I critiqued in detail in the review essay that I sent in an earlier link on this thread.
Ken, stop accusing your critics of misinterpreting your beloved 'trash'; your defensiveness comes across as lacking the essential scholarly qualities of civility, gratitude and humility in the face of constructive criticism. You are entitled to your opinion and your critics are entitled to theirs. But no one is entitled to alternative facts.
I misspell too, therefore I am human.
Biko
On Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 6:43 PM, Kenneth Harrow
<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Biko
For of all, I am having trouble spelling things correctly all the time, so please excuse my errors. Like ad hominem.
Anyway, I have read and taught stuart hall's magnum opus, Representation. Biko, you cite the sources you want, from Williams and the left on, Althusser etc. all that is there. i understand where there Birmingham school came from, and how stuart hall, and Gilroy let's add, built on the Marxist base of the school to add in race; and eventually gender.
The way that hall theorized in Representation included a patient, clear, excellent explication of deconstruction and how it worked. He went far beyond the Marxist ideological base.
You're right, I don't need to defend Spivak. Her positions are really quite admirable, especially as she grew with time. Don't know if you have followed her later work where she incorporates more on Africa. Initially she ignored it; then she reached out, awkwardly, etc etc. not worth going over all that personal stuff. In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason we have an orientation that includes Africa, though india is her focus. No matter, I do not want to defend her, really, but to pay homage to her as an important thinker for us, for us who are focused on Africa, on the black diaspora, on race, on all we include in the global south. She is an important voice for the critique of capitalism of today, though frankly I am much more indebted to Comaroff and Comaroff these days as her older, basically Marxist critique, belongs to the 1980s and 1990s, for me…
As for derrida, he was an important influence on hall et al. that's all I meant to be saying, and Spivak was certainly important as well. Think of the screen generation.
Frankly biko, when you use the term "African" it is far too broad for me. I don't believe there is such an entity called "Africa." Not just because it is a continent, but because there is no single way of thinking, no single cultural base, etc. what is shared, is the history; but if you talk to historians, they evoke difference, not commonality. It is just too big and diverse to have a single base.
Well, you can argue back from a negritude point of view, which I in fact find compelling. But too complicated to lay out here in short compass.
Where is our difference (besides your getting my goat by not accepting my use of the term trash, and deliberately misrepresenting it); it is in the Africana paradigm, the afrocentric tempels version, that argues for a broad application of notions like ubuntu as more than regional. I don't buy that. I've lived in parts of west Africa and central Africa, and cannot think of greater difference than, say, southern Cameroon and northern Cameroon; Nigeria and Senegal; cape verde and guinea; and on and on. Coastal life and people; Sahelian life and culture. When you argue specifics, I am with you. The broad strokes that ask, what did Spivak do for us, what did derrida do for us? That starts to distance me, because the us is too broad, because what did they do takes us away from what did they write that we can use.
Lastly, I do not consider progressives my enemies.
That's another issue.
Lastly, if I were to critique her work, it would be to follow her own lines in revising her claims re Subaltern can't talk argument. She moves too far from my intellectual world now for me to want to go back and dig into the issues of her take on hegel etc. my time is limited. If the focus turns away from Africa, I have only short time for it. She really wrote about an earlier period, and we need to ask, like ferguson, what can we do about African culture and life in an age of neoliberalism, globalization. Very hard for me to invest time in things that are peripheral to that focus. If I were to argue against white supremacy, it would not be based on derrida or Spivak, but on mbembe and weheliye—especially the latter. He is speaking to us today, is relevant to our moment, where the words "white supremacy" make sense in the context of black lives matter.
Sorry to be so diffuse
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 28 April 2018 at 16:50
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
Ken, you do not need to defend Spivak against criticism. Rather you should add your own criticism about her work and the works of those you admire to help chart a new course for younger scholars. Do you think that her initials stand for Great Comrade Stalin who is above criticism? You may want to read Aijaz Ahmad and Terry Eagleton to borrow some critical perspectives before you crown her the founding mother of postcolonial theory. Her translation of Derrida made her name and her concept of strategic essentialism and epistemic violence are influential but her passing references to Africa apeear consistently disdainful.
Similarly, attributing the birth of cultural studies to Derrida without any evidence is a claim that Stuart Hall would find strange given his own account that the Marxist influences were those of English theorists like Williams who privileged the study of working class culture as part of the intervention to wean them from conservative authoritarian populism the way that CLR James and Gramsci studied popular culture for the same reason. The second paradigm of cultural studies that Hall identified was that of Althusser with emphasis on the role of ideology as a powerful epiphenomenon that can sometimes shape the economic infrastructure, contrary to crude economism. Hall modestly did not identify the Africana paradigm in cultural studies that he, Gilroy, James and Du Bois exemplified. But he distanced the field from the postmodernists who rejected the need for a revolution and claimed to do so in the name of the masses.
Derrida centered much of his critique against white supremacy on the important contributions of Africans to civilization and Spivak was disdainful towards Derrida for such a territorial attachment to his birth place, Africa. Derrida would never claim that he invented the methodology of cultural studies with deconstruction which predated him in the works of Marx and others as he admitted in Specters of Marx where he also embraced the African philosophy of the forgiveness of the unforgivable by calling for the cancellation of the debts of the Third World and a return to the reading of the works of Marx which you claim are no longer relevant while you recommend Kant.
Biko
On Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 1:19 PM, Kenneth Harrow
<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
A word or two in defense of Spivak, and against the attacks posed here or by biko.
We need to draw a line between abhominin attacks—which are definitely fun for me, I am a sucker for that—and serious intellectual engagement. Most well known intellectuals make a fortune when they give talks. I wish they wouldn't charge anything; or like me, charge low fees. I don't like the signs of elitism in our profession. That said, it has absolutely nothing to do with what they write.
My view.
Spivak can rightly claim that she and 2-3 others were foundational for postcolonial studies. She walks along with derrida, said, and Bhabha. Derrida provided the deconstructionist tools with which to attack the metaphysics of presence, as butler proclaims, that underlies western metaphysics. He provided ways of attacking phallogocentrism, tracking it from plato through rousseau to the present. I believe he was the most profound philosopher of our times, and wrote from a position that enabled us to claim values that would underlie the positions embraced by stuart hall, positions I identify with cultural studies. And he provided the methodology for cultural studies. Spivak was grounded in derrida, translated grammatology, and utilized deconstruction so as to establish political positions that made resistance to colonialism and now to globalization from the north possible. At her height, she and Bhabha, following after said and fanon, provided the real bases for all scholarship on postcolonialism.
Her approach and time have passed. Her critique should not. We should honor properly figures of her stature in our field, "our" meaning those concerned with African studies and global south studies.
If you want to cast aspersions against her because she has certain character traits you don't like, or because her work is so dense and difficult to understand, or because she is a figure at Columbia, following in fact said's high position there, etc etc, that is irrelevant. You can't seriously teach postcolonialism without her work being central.
Do we still really teach postcolonialism? I doubt it; the term, shaky from the start, was merely a convenience to replace third world, or non-western, studies; and those, which accompanied work on neocolonialism, were followed by postcolonialism. The debate about it really being post were and are tedious, boring, useless, and I won't cry to see global south replace it.
But the theorizing, the application of Marxist theory and deconstruction to the current capitalist phase, is of the highest order, and that's all that really matters. To rephrase this, high theory has had its day, and is gone. But we have inherited cultural studies, and a slew of major thinkers and scholars like mbembe, ferguson, Mudimbe, Robert young, who made our field real. I am glad to add weheliye to the list of influential contemporary theorists.
I'd love to hear more about those I should be reading.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 27 April 2018 at 19:56
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
Brown
After listening to five of Spivak's lectures, thanks to you tube, I have to say that
the above description of Spivak seems quite appropriate. "Eclectic and contradictory" sums it all up- subject to new information.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora
8608322815 Phone
8608322804 Fax
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