I don't see a huge epistemic gulf between you and Ken on this issue. Both of you acknowledge the realities of mutual borrowings, unintended and intended seepages, instrumental engagements, inversions, distortions, and tense but creative interactions in the hegemonic encounter(s) between Europe and Africa. Your point is taken that the conquest was a seminal moment of disruption to which one should return as a foundational referent in analyzing the issue of exchange and other power-laden outcomes of the colonial encounter. But if one always starts from or always returns by default to the notion that colonization was not just a moment of disruption but that all other things flowed from this foundational disruption, doesn't one miss how new forms of expressions developed that were neither European nor African and were instrumentalized in ways that neither preexisting African or European expressive norms could have envisaged or accounted for? Many of these new forms actually self-consciously rebelled against European expectations and norms even if, as you argued, the environment for their emergence may have partly been created by colonization. And, more epistemologically, doesn't the approach of tracing everything back to the foundational disruption of conquest and colonization valorize the reach of colonial power? Doesn't it also prejudice and foretell the trajectory and outcome of any inquiry into these encounters, making colonial inquiry little more than what Fred Cooper calls doing history backwards? I understand Ken to be arguing that in spite of the clearly discernible power asymmetry between colonizer and colonized and maybe because of it the colonial encounter produced unexpectedly novel forms of self-expression and Othering, the parameters and utility of which neither party could control or contain.
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Biko Agozino <bikozino@yahoo.com> wrote:
Bro ken,
Oh yes, I agree, we did take many things from Europeans (including their languages and often against their will) but will you agree with me that they took many things from us too? In the complex cultural exchanges that you talk about, I hear only about what the enslaved took from the enslaver but nothing about the lessons in humanity that the enslaved taught the greatest human rights abusers that ever lived (look how long, 400 years!).
Thanks for the recommended texts, I look forward to reading them and learning more, all I know is that I do not know enough. I am with you in valuing literature as useful historical documents with verisimilitude and I cite them in my scholarly texts the way that Marx, Freud, Foucault and Jeyifo did. I would never say that sister Nwapa was deluded, all I said is that those fictional narratives are not as significant as the documented history of the actual struggles of African women (many of them illiterate in European languages and so did not author any master narratives, leaving only authentic oral traditions, arts and images) but they are no less deserving of credit for their contributions to women's human rights globally, in fact they are more deserving of such credit.
So let me put it to you again that European women learned about human rights from African women, not vice versa. Similarly, European men learned about the importance of respecting human rights from African men and not vice versa. This is part of what Europeans borrowed from the rest in the cultural exchanges that you talk about. It is part of the inverted reading of Walter Rodney - How Africa Developed Europe - which was the thesis of Eric Williams - Capitalism and Slavery - that Rodney was indeed inverting in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
It is not 'Afrocentric reduction' to state that Europe learned a lot from Africa. It is a statement of fact. Only Eurocentrism, due to white superiorism, would demure when confronted with the evidence of the cultural borrowings of the Occident from the Orient. Of course, Egypt is respected worldwide because it is the best documented source of the African gifts to the entire world civilization, not because it is the only source. Afrocentricity insists that when we are studying Africa, we should make Africa the center of our discourse or we would fall into pitfalls of Eurocentrism. You are welcome to disagree but I am sure that in your own field, you make the study of literature the center of your discourse for good reasons. Why then push a notion that there was this peculiar one-way exchange (I know you said that you no longer see it as one way, yet your account remains one-wayrist) in which Africans borrowed everything from the West?
Just let me know one thing that you believe that Europe borrowed culturally from Africa. Oh no, not just music, please.
Biko
> Date: Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 1:01 PM
--- On Wed, 6/29/11, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
> From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Imperiled Revolutions
> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
--> dear friend biko
> perhaps you will disagree with my point; i don't go 100%
> with your basing your claims on the writings of ch anta diop
> or chancellor williams; but will happily leave that debate
> to the historians, of which i am definitely not one. maybe
> you could call me an amateur in history, but merely a
> relatively well read one.
>
> but really, i did not want to communicate that africans got
> their human rights education from europeans. i am saying
> something that i hope is much more important, namely, that
> the exchange between europe and africa was multifaceted. for
> many years i read it as a one-way street of oppression. i
> read it more in the way khatibi did when he wrote about an
> exchange that entailed, let's call it, dimensions of
> closeness as well as distance, dimensions of giving as well
> as taking; dimensions even of love as well as hatred. i
> would say dimensions of oppression--even fundamentally
> oppression given the colonial context--but also positive
> encounters.
> i was not, not, not, trying to say the west invented "human
> rights" and gave it to africans. i did say, and think, that
> the west had its ideas of liberal human rights and gender
> rights agendas, and that in some instances africans were
> receptive to those ideas, assimilated them,
> reterritorialized them, made them their own. there were many
> forms of assimilation; if you consider the women writers i
> cited, they saw themselves as being liberated because of
> their schooling and encounters with europeans who considered
> themselves purveyors of enlightenment.
> if you want to tell me both were deluded, i would answer,
> well, yes, to some extent. but not so completely. the
> europeans were certainly deluded in their notions of being
> superior and extending a superior civilization. they were
> conquerors, after all, and their "giving" was typically
> condescending, the way we think of 1950s liberalism in the
> u.s.
> i would very much argue, along with you, that the women
> were not passive, empty vessels into whom their teachers,
> sometimes beloved (as mariama ba says), force-fed them their
> thoughts. even if they themselves thought so, i would argue,
> with you, that they were participants in a society where
> gender relations had a long history, and were marked by
> complex relations of power, not one way streets of
> patriarchal domination.
> but clearly the african women who built their
> subjectivities around what values they found positive were
> claiming and making of those ideas what worked best for
> themselves. they called themselves New Africans in the 1930s
> and 1940s; danced rhumbas, got dressed up for clubs,
> organized political parties, participated in the building of
> urban cultures. All of this, all of this under the multiple
> influences of african understandings of the self, of
> european models, of muslim or christian or traditional
> religious positions. and all of it subjected to images of
> the self conveyed in films, posters, photos, even radio
> shows. it was all there, all shaping a sense of who one was,
> especially in the cities.
> i can see this in the photos and posing of subjects of
> seydou keita, can see it in films like Afrique sur Seine,
> can read it in the music and arts of the period, in nigeria
> and in senegal, two countries whose cultural history i have
> taught (in basic terms only, admittedly).
> culture was mixed; how could the people not be as well?
> i think we all take ideas from each other, though under
> conditions of unequal power distribution. even a slave can
> take from the master-slave relationship and appropriate
> conditions of subjectivity that eventuate in his supplanting
> the master--this is hegel's thesis.
> your appeal to historical values merely confirms my own
> notion that EVERY people, every "civilization" is the heir
> of multiple threads, not of any single originary foundation.
> that's where i part from afrocentric reductions of that
> foundation to egypt.
> none of us just receives culture: we add, and shape it, as
> we do language. and sometimes it is under conditions of
> occupation and conquest. indeed, that's why latinate
> languages are spoken in europe, despite the germanic rule.
> please excuse the lengthy rumination.
> let me repeat: i do not, do not believe it was "lessons
> learned from the West," but rather a complicated cultural
> exchange, under conditions of unequal power, which each
> obtained elements from the other; and where some found much
> more that was profitable to them in this exchange than
> others.
> if you've not yet read hampate ba's masterpiece, Wangrin, i
> commend it to you. it paints a compelling portrait of a
> brilliant manipulative trickster who turns the european
> system against itself for his own purposes and gain.
> if you think it is just fiction, i commend to you the
> autobiography of birago diop who became the administrator
> for veterinary services for all west africa, and who took
> what he pleased, discarded what displeased of the french.
> his brilliant Tales of Amadou Koumba give us the best
> renditions of african tales, tales from west africa,
> rendered in french.
> come to think of it, isn't this true of achebe's work as
> well?
> best
> ken
>
> On 6/29/11 6:17 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:
> > bro ken,
> >
> > You are pushing a false thesis that Fela Kuti debunked
> long ago - the idea that human rights were gifts from Beasts
> of No Nation to African human beings. Please refer to Cheikh
> Anta Diop (Precolonial Black Africa) and Chancellor Williams
> (The Destruction of African Civilization) to see that
> African declarations of the rights of all human beings (not
> just of free men) and respect for human rights predated the
> Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights.
> >
> > The novels that you cite pale into insignificance in
> the annals of African women's rights in comparison to the
> daring raids of Harriet Tubman to free the enslaved;
> Jamaican Maroon women did the same; the Aba Women's War of
> 1929 against British colonialism; The Abeokuta Women's
> deposing of the colonial puppet - the Alake; the Kikuyu
> women's resistance against forced labor in the 1950s; and
> the South African women's resistance against Pass Law in the
> 1950s.
> >
> > Far from being lessons learned from the West, women's
> rights, just like human rights are lessons that the West
> learned from Africans. First, they debated for centuries to
> determine whether Africans were human or property the way
> they debated whether women were property or human. Enslaved
> Africans in Haiti answered affirmatively to teach the
> Europeans that we are human, all too human. Soon after wards
> and with the support of African men like Frederick Douglas
> and Du Bois, women also won the recognition that they are
> fully human too.
> >
> > Fanon teaches us that Europeans are human rights
> frauds to the extent that they were never tired of talking
> about human rights but abominate human beings everywhere
> they found them. The invasion of Libya has nothing to do
> with humanitarianism except in the sense of vegetarianism.
> >
> > Biko
> >
> > --- On Tue, 6/28/11, kenneth harrow<harrow@msu.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> From: kenneth harrow<harrow@msu.edu>
> >> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -
> Imperiled Revolutions
> >> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> >> Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 4:11 PM
> >> hi gloria
> >> i agree that the absence of moral authority makes
> the
> >> rhetorical reasons for invading sound hollow. they
> mostly
> >> are hollow.
> >> i couldn't begin to examine the moral authority of
> an
> >> invading force to judge the validity of the
> invasion.
> >> i want to turn it around and claim that nations
> always act
> >> on their own national interest. if a leader were
> not to do
> >> so, he or she would be booted out.
> >> so the question for me becomes, given that france
> and the
> >> u.s. and the u.k. are acting in libya for their
> own national
> >> interest, is the intervention itself something
> that i am
> >> happy is happening. and i mostly feel that
> ghaddafi should
> >> not have been allowed to quash the movements
> against his
> >> regime by the use of force.
> >> i wish there were a way we could lend support to
> the
> >> uprisings in syria and bahrein and yemen, the
> democracy
> >> movement in morocco, even in algeria. i find these
> movements
> >> enormously inspiring.
> >> i am skeptical that support for these movements
> will
> >> "install democracy." i am opposed to a model of
> >> african/arab/latin american peoples sitting around
> waiting
> >> for outsiders to install things into them.
> >> on the other hand, on both sides, that of the
> invaders and
> >> the invaded, there are complicated mixed motives
> for action.
> >> sometimes it might be a simple landgrab, but often
> the
> >> contradictions between rhetoric and actions point
> to mixed
> >> motives.
> >> i've only recently come to see this, that despite
> the
> >> oppression of colonialism africans took away from
> the
> >> encounter with the colonialists much that they
> wanted and
> >> were able to use to their advantage, included
> ideas about
> >> liberal human rights, gender rights, and so on.
> and some of
> >> this, maybe most of it, was despite colonial
> policies. for
> >> instance, colonial censorship was very severe, but
> the ideal
> >> of freedom of the press and rights of
> self-expression
> >> couldn't be extinguished, and they carry through
> today with
> >> journalists in africa some of the very bravest
> people on
> >> earth. in country after country that i follow, i
> see
> >> journalists on the firing line, and willing to
> risk jail or
> >> their lives. why is that?
> >> we in the west talk about freedom of the press.
> there is
> >> much we could criticize about murdoch's press as
> biased and
> >> worthless trash; but that ideal of a free press,
> especially
> >> in countries like cameroon and senegal, is lived
> at a much
> >> much higher level than i've ever seen in the u.s.
> >> basta
> >> thanks for your response and thoughts
> >> ken
> >> (by the way, to justify my comment about
> women's
> >> rights being something african women took to
> their
> >> advantage, i would offer the novels of nwapa,
> emecheta,
> >> mariama ba....the older women authors who set the
> stage for
> >> african women's writing, as testament to my claim.
> they
> >> themselves wrote about their experiences in
> schools when
> >> they were young that gave them a spirit of
> freedom. add
> >> aidoo to that list.
> >> another great example is wangrin by hampate ba,
> but that is
> >> another story)
> >> On 6/28/11 7:06 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
> wrote:
> >>> Ken, this time around I am merely the
> messenger, not
> >> the author,
> >>> although I note your
> comments.
> >>>
> >>> Incidentally I disagree with your view that
> an
> >> invading power should not at least
> >>> have some semblance of moral authority
> and some
> >> 'locus standi'. Without that
> >>> its justification for invasion sounds hollow
> and it
> >> joins the league of blatant hypocrites.
> >>> To say that you, as a power, are
> invading to
> >> install democracy whilst
> >>> your own government is undemocratic is weird.
> What do
> >> you think?
> >>> Dr. Gloria Emeagwali
> >>> www.africahistory.net
> >>> www.esnips.com/web/GloriaEmeagwali
> >>> emeagwali@ccsu.edu
> >>> ________________________________________
> >>> From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> >> [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com]
> >> On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
> >>> Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 5:51 AM
> >>> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> >>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -
> Imperiled
> >> Revolutions
> >>> the binary postulated here is too neat.
> "Islam" is
> >> better written
> >>> "Islams." there are strong divisions in most
> countries
> >> in the middle
> >>> east, i believe, concerning more conservative
> versus
> >> more liberal
> >>> understandings of islam.
> >>> i think one could also argue that liberal
> secularism
> >> is also the product
> >>> of a relatively small segment of most
> societies around
> >> the world, with
> >>> differences. in the u.s. conservatives run
> against
> >> "secular humanism,"
> >>> and have managed to demonize it, for example.
> and the
> >> split here in
> >>> france is clearly along similar left-right
> divisions
> >> over liberal
> >>> secularism.
> >>> ken
> >>>
> >>> On 6/26/11 4:15 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria
> (History)
> >> wrote:
> >>>> Islam is embraced by the vast majority of
> the
> >> Middle East. The idea of a liberal secular
> republic is the
> >> vision of the bourgeoisie, professional elements
> among the
> >> middle strata, and the more organized and skilled
> sections
> >> of the working class. There is little doubt that
> the mosque
> >> provided an institutional foundation for
> opposition to
> >> secular authoritarian leaders – the Church took
> on a
> >> similar role in Eastern Europe under communism –
> and it
> >> makes sense that organizations like the Muslim
> Brotherhood
> >> should have a jump start on political organization
> in the
> >> post-revolutionary society.
> >>> --
> >>> 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,
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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
> >>
> >> -- 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
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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
>
> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
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