Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - African Writing Systems

You are right, michael, in my view. It is wrong to take a foreign literary category, and then try to apply it to one’s own cultural production. 

Even the words don’t fit, so you are totally right to say it is Oriki tradition, and have the non-yoruba speakers learn what an oriki is, rather than to say it is an epic, or like an epic except that, etc etc.

Then we get into the horrible statements, like, did africa ever produce a shakespeare. 

Instead of a serious answer it is more appropriate to launch a curse or a belly laugh or cry tears at the pain that that question caused over too long a period.

But the real answer has to be, wrong question. 

And then, why ask that wrong question. And then, as I said, this is what Mudimbe has made super-clear all those years ago

ken

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, 4 September 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - African Writing Systems

Thank you so much, Ken, for the point you just made here, that, "The trouble with old school afrocentrism and egyptology is that it swallows european notions of civilization and one-ups it by saying, we too are civilized, and before anyone else." Wow, this notion has baffled my intellectual curiosity all lifelong! I recall as an undergraduate student when Ruth Finnegan came up with the idea that there was no epic tradition in African oral culture. It would take Isidore Okpewho to counter the claim many years after and then the African literary world breathed a sigh of relief that indeed we, too, have the epic tradition. I told myself "wow" so we now have what the west claimed we did not have because we were able to authenticate ours through their established model? Is that really ours? I mused to myself upfront that I believed what the Yoruba people had and would always have was the "Oriki" tradition and it should be good enough for our cultural and intellectual feed, having no connection with the western definition of the epic. 

Anyway, Sorry for my rambling on this matter, but it is just my way of saying in three words "I agree absolutely" with what you just noted here, Ken, and that is whether or not my example delivers it.

 

Michael

On Monday, September 4, 2017 7:42 AM, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

The word civilization is a term of colonial discourse used to justify the domination of one group over another, either intellectually or politically. That has been true especially with africa, and the whole point of things fall apart has been to demonstrate the fallaciousness of the term. Not simply because whites are hypocritical in the use of the term—after all, that was conrad’s point in heart of darkness-but more to take a community that has no large buildings or writing system, or any of the other european notions of the attributes of civilization, and to show its civilized values.
The trouble with old school afrocentrism and egyptology is that it swallows european notions of civilization and one-ups it by saying, we too are civilized, and before anyone else.
I will stand by this claim forever. There is nothing worse that adopting european notions of civilization, from latin civitas, and claiming we too are civilized. It is completely as mudimbe has claimed to be trapped by accepting the european frame of epistemology, to be trapped by the notions of value and education generated by the very society that conquered you.
The key word in the posting below is “inferiority.”
Last point: conrad saw the hypocrisy in colonialism, but not in the notion of civilization. It took achebe to go that next step because conrad was an outsider with no knowledge of africa people or society, except from the outside and through the colonial lens. Achebe attacked him for his racism, an underlying attribute of the european “civilized” man. I am not using scare quotes to be ironic, but to signal exactly what mudimbe has written.

ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/









On 04/09/2017, 03:01, "'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>"It now seems convetional for any group that lays claim to civilization to show proof that it has a writing system equal to the West in evolutionary stages or in a completed format"
>
>But isn't a belief in the absence or presence of such a writing system as the determinant of the inferiority or non-inferiority of a civilization suspect logically and  psychologically -- and thus a breeding ground for egregious inferiority or superiority complexes that continue to put much of black scholarship or historiography on a defensive and diversionary trajectory that keeps gnawing the (human) spirit?
>
>
>
>> On Sep 3, 2017, at 9:34 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> It now seems convetional for any group that lays claim to civilization to show proof that it has a writing system equal to the West in evolutionary stages or in a completed format
>
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