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 Re: المـــــركـــــزيـة الأفــــريــقــــــيـة (Re: Tanash)
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To the point of this paper, however, what is curious to me, is
the way that various other forms of Afrocentricity, no matter how carefully presented, are taken to be provocations by various white critics. As chief example of white America's tendency to get provoked I would like to examine the curious history of The New Republic. Perhaps my sampling is not scientific, since I do not subscribe to or follow the publication with regular interest, but two issues especially stand out. First, there was the "Race on Campus" issue which was translated by the cover artist as an arm-wrestling match between a sweaty white hand and an imposing black hand. "Race on Campus" equals a one-on-one macho competition which produces exactly one winner and one loser. I have on disc a long complaint about that issue, which I will append to this paper, but the very next February, in time again for black history month, The New Republic flashed another cover, this time ridiculing Afrocentric scholarship.
The Feb. 10, 1992, article by Mary Lefkowitz was boldly titled, "Not out of Africa: The origins of Greece and the illusions of Afrocentrists." Now, Professor Lefkowitz is, I presume, a serious white person, responding to serious Afrocentric scholarship, but it is interesting to see how she nevertheless treats Afrocentricity as a provocation. These are her words:
Now classicists in the late modern world have more than enough grounds for paranoia. We are reminded daily that our subject is useless, irrelevant, boring-all the things that, in our opinion, it is not. But now a new set of charges has been added. Not only students, but also the many academic acolytes of Martin Bernal's influential theories about "the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization," and Bernal himself ask us to acknowledge that we have been racists and liars, the perpetrators of a vast intellectual and cultural cover-up, or at the very least the suppressors of an African past that, until our students and our colleagues began to mention it, we had ourselves known nothing about. (p. 30)
The rest of the article belabors the work of Martin Bernal, certainly the least provocative Afrocentrist imaginable. One even gets the impression that Diop might be one of Bernal's "academic acolytes." In fact, Diop gets a single paragraph of treatment, and then only because it is "Asante's opinion" that Diop is somehow of supreme importance. Thus, in response to Asante's opinion, Professor Lefkowitz gives Diop the following treatment:
In The African Origin of Civilization, a work originally published in French in 1967, Diop claimed that Europeans have consistently falsified evidence that suggests that the Egyptians were black-skinned. He traces Egyptian influence on Greece back to prehistoric times, claiming that Cecrops (a half-snake/half-man whom the Athenians themselves regarded as indigenous) came to Attica from Egypt, and Danaus (who, according to the Greeks, was of Greek descent) taught the Greeks agriculture and metalurgy. According to Diop, Greek mythology reflects the resentment of the Indo-Europeans against this cultural domination. Cadmus was driven out of Thebes; Orestes murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, celebrates the triumph of patriarchy over matriarchy, Aeneas rejects and abandons Dido. The white world rejected the ideas of other cultures as soon as it could-and "this is the meaning of the Aeneid." (p. 31)
From the treatment Diop receives, Professor Lefkowitz seems to indicate that the work of Diop is a provocation too absurd to deserve more than interlinear innuendos of dismissal.
At some other time, perhaps, I will outline the many methodological, scholarly, and logical flaws in the approach which Professor Lefkowitz takes to the body of Afrocentric scholarship. For instance, she presents unschooled hearsay as her opening examples of Afrocentrism, sets Afrocentrism up as chiefly an attack on the character of white scholars, avoids important issues such as human origin itself, and pretends that Egypt has few claims on ancient developments. And just in case one is interested in accuracy, Diop's book was first printed in French in 1955, not 1967 as reported by Professor Lefkowitz, but we begin to split hairs. Important here is the phenomenon of Professor Lefkowitz and the New Republic collaborating on a put-down of Afrocentricity, treating the mildest of the Afrocentrists, Martin Bernal, as provocation for Afrocentrism's exile from intellectual respectability.
يتبــــــــــــع ....
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Tanash
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست