Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand Language

(small name correction. the editor of Nka is salah m. hassan, a brilliant scholar in art)

k

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:21 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand Language

 

Toyin Adepoju.

You have made a very powerful argument here and I cannot but concur.

African intellectuals have contributed to undercutting their own intellectual traditions by insisting they are incapable of breathing without upholding the  linguistic dominance of the West.

You and Baba Kadiri now seem to be inclining toward the same intellectual alignment at last. How times change!

OAA

Mr President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.

Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>

Date: 31/10/2020 08:44 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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Writing well in any language is vital.

Writing well in English has particular strategic value.

But...why should an academic working in Africa make being taken seriously by Western academics and scholars  one of his or her aspirations?

Did Western academia and scholarship develop by aspiring to be taken seriously by anyone else?

They created a self referential system, in which they developed their tradition by focusing on studying and referencing each other, and making the intrinsic structure of the tradition thus created over the centuries their points of reference in engaging with other traditions.

I will answer why it is thought we need what Paulin Hountondji rightly described in a series of essays as epistemic extraversion in African discourse.

African academia may be described as still cast in a colonialist mold, in which scholarship is oriented by the epistemic, economic, political and geographical centre represented by the West. 

Publishing in Western based journals and by Western based publishers remains the acme of academic success.

Understandably so, because the West created the currently dominant global academic and economic system and running for centuries, they have the best of this system.

But must this always remain so?

Why can globally central journals not also be based in African universities the way that Research in African Literatures and African Arts, two of the most important journals in the field, are based in Western universities?

Nka, one of the leading journals in modern African art, was founded by three African immigrants in the US, Okwui Enenwezor, Chika Oke-Agulu and Saleh Hsaan, if I got the last name right.

Another such immigrant, Sylvester Ogbechie, founded Critical Interventions, another fine journal, later subsumed by a big academic publishing company, Taylor and Francis, leading to questions  central to the continuing relevance of publishing models in academic journal publishing.

When Ogbechie was in sole control of the journal, paying for it was affordable for the general reader, each article costing $5.

Now that it has become part of the Taylor and Francis group, pricing has been subsumed into the traditional high prices of closed access Western academic journals, so that each issue of the journal, even as far back as its first issue, costs $169.

This model of journal pricing is unsustainable and the backlash from Western scholars and institutions, even the richest such as Harvard, suggests, in my view,  that only open access journals will survive beyond the next 50 years

So, groups of people, individuals, are also in the journal creation and publishing business.

Enwezor's ascension to becoming a powerful voice in global art owed a great deal to his relentless writing and publication, to which Nka was central.

The question should be- not how to be taken seriously by Western scholars, but how to develop your own scholarly ecosystem that is both organic to you and globally impactful.

African academic promotion criteria also need to look critically at the weighting given to journal and book publication from different parts of the world.

The University of Benin, for example,  at one time and perhaps till now, used to have as their criteria for professorship a certain number of external publications, which in my view, is a euphemism for publication by Western publishers, as a means of assuring the global validity of the scholarly achievement of the academic.

This is understandable, in the light of the sad history of academic journal publication in Nigeria, a mix of idealism, with some journals and opportunism, as with others.

But Albert Einstein's three epochal 1905 papers that reshaped physics and got him the Nobel Prize were published in one journal in Germany, Annal Der Physik, Annals of Physics, a journal that became powerful through the efforts of its individual founder and editors who not only published first rate work but kept their readers  abreast of developments in Europe by publishing works in translation from other European countries, as described by Jungnickel and McCommach in Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein Vol. 1(1990:34-9)

For scholars outside Germany to read Einstein's work, they had to have translations in other languages though the bulk of the work was in the universal language of mathematics. The journal is now published in English.

Central point- academic systems and their organs, such as journals, are often the creation of individuals and groups, agents serving particular agendas.

Why must scholarship about Africa and even more so by Africans outside the West be oriented towards  Western scholarly systems?

Abiola Irele, in his painfully poignant ''The African Scholar'' writing from the vantage point of his exile in US academia after degrees in Africa and the West and a career built in African universities, , describes Africa as marginal in Western scholarship.

Why should you struggle to define yourself in terms of someone else to whom your own concerns are not central?

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 03:28, Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

i keep saying this: english has been spoken in west africa LONGER than in the united states. pidgin englishes are real languages, and were formed, like american english or canadian english, by the intersection of local languages and british english; the literature in pidgin, all along the coast, is as important a body as any; the use of pidgin in film is important; the songs, the poetry. what more could you want? british english now is only one variant, and no longer the dominant one (american english is) of a global body of languages.

i once asked ngugi when he came to msu about pidgin, which had as much cachee as the swahili he knew, and disregarded in his writings. and what is swahili if not a creolized language.

i am sure farooq can confirm, go back far enough, all languages are creolized versions of some earlier language. none are pure, except for the one instantaneous moment when it is uttered. a second later it has changed. like us

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

---

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2020 6:35 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

Moses:

Do they really say that "so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important?"

Or

That we should use our mother tongues at the primary level, at the very list, and promote African languages? Ngugi recently won the prize in Swahili, and his recent novel is written in English.

 

 

Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important.

 

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, October 30, 2020 at 5:28 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

 

Earlier today, I had a Zoom session with the Music Study Group of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Nigeria. Thanks to

Peter Sylvanus

, the HOD of Music at UNN, for organizing it.

One of the questions put to me during the session is how the marginalized theoretical and scholarly perspectives of Nigeria/Africa can receive serious reception and respect in a global (read Western-dominated) academic culture that devalues Global South thinkers and thinking by default and values Euro-American ones also by default.

There are several strategies, some of which I shared with the group, but one aspect of the answer that I didn't get to cover adequately is that of language. In my experience the cheapest, easiest excuse that the Western academy uses to exclude and disenfranchise African scholars and their perspectives is to say that their writing is poor—that they can't write.

There are of course all kinds of racist and othering underpinnings to this tactic, but sometimes the excuse is based on an actually existing writing deficit. And I would argue, following our late friend, Pius Adesanmi, that to be taken seriously and be reckoned with in the Western academy, we have to write back to Western theorists as insurgents bypassing and crashing the gates and gatekeepers but we have to do so in a language that is intelligible to the gatekeepers, in their own academic lexicon. That way, you take that go-to alibi off the table and compel them to examine and engage with your work on its merit.

You can have, as Africa-based scholars often do, radical, iconoclastic, novel, and revisionist perspectives, theories, and approaches, but if you do not deprive your Western interlocutors of the poor writing excuse, they'll always use it to exclude you.

That is why I emphasize linguistic mastery and writing excellence, and lament the decline of writing in Nigerian universities. If the writing is bad no one is going to grasp or have the patience to comprehend the radically new theory and argument you're advancing. And this contention applies to all disciplines, including the hard sciences.

Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important. Whether we like it or not, English is the scholarly Lingua Franca of the world we live in and your access to global scholarly conversations and intellectual capital is directly proportional to your written and oral fluency in it. Ask the South Asian scholars of the subaltern collective how they broke through and forced their theories on the Western academy after going through a similar complaining phase as us.

More importantly, if we're asking for a hearing at the theoretical table, it is not compromise or self-betrayal to adopt the prevailing paradigmatic linguistic medium. After all, we're the ones seeking to alter the global epistemological dynamic, force a reckoning with African and Africa-derived theories, and teach Western scholars our ways of knowing and seeing the world.

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