-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Afrocentrism
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:07:01 -0600
From: Abdul Alkalimat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: H-NET Discussion List for African American Studies
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From: Harold Forsythe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Perhaps this discussion about Afrocentricity can gain renewal by
recalling the thought and work of Franz Fanon (1937-1961). Dr. Fanon,
a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist trained at Lyon under
Tosquelles, was a powerfully influential black thinker in the 1960s and
beyond. He seems to have used the more radical trends in Western
(read: European) social thinking--psychoanalysis, existentialism,
Marxism--to craft a revolutionary philosophy that melded politics,
psychology, and the arts into a comprehensive critique of the West and a
schedule of renewal for "the Rest of Us."
Though much of Dr. Fanon's empirical work was on Arabs and Berbers in
Algeria, I do not find thinking back on my reading of his work in the
late-1960s/early-1970s, an essentialist grasping of the culture of North
Africans as the essential tool for undoing racism, colonialism, etc.
Fanon does, of course, note that Algerian women sometimes dressed as
Europeans, other times completely covered as Arabs, but these
representations were all in the cause of getting through French military
roadblocks to gain physical access to the colonial centers of the
towns. For Fanon, the essence of Algerianness, was commitment to the
revolution that would gain self-governance for the people(s) of North
Africa. And when Fanon expanded his perspective in his last book, The
Wretched of the Earth, his perspective seems not to have changed.
Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, indeed all were called upon to pursue
a revolutionary project that the French of the 1780s would have
recognized, even though the French of the 1950s opposed.
Fanon recognized culture as an important category but he would not
essentialize it as the equivalent of a particular type of humanity;
perhaps because he knew that blackness was no more a defense against
neurosis or psychosis than Frenchness was.
Fanon stimulated his critics, notably the political philosopher Hannah
Arendt, who found Fanon's revolutionary formula dangerous. He also
found his emulators, notably the founders of the Black Panther Party.
Bobby Seals and Huey Newton may have created a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
political party but they were self-confessed Fanonists. They found
Fanon's exhortation of the power and dignity of the oppressed the
essence for a politics. They organized black youth in the ghettoes but
they also practiced a multiracial politics that was most un-Afrocentric.
How did we get from the revolutionary political theory of the 1960s to
the cultural consolation of the 1980s and 90s? This is clearly a
question for historians of the African-American experience. The critics
of Afrocentricity, as far as I can see, do not find it dangerous, they
find it silly (see Clarence Walker, We Can't Go Home Again.)
Surely, Wilson Moses is right to note that blackfolks are entitled to
consolation even if through fantasy. And if fantasy is enough for you,
there is no sense in us arguing.
But for those in our world, for those on this list, for whom fantasy is
not enough: where do we go from here? Trained at Euro-American managed
and designed universities, in Euro-American shaped disciplines, and
working in those same institutions, we are faced with an astonishing
dilemma: retreat to a cognitive dissonant intellectual ghetto of mutual
cultural incomprehensibility or craft a metatheory that sees all human
beings in relationship in a societal whole as Fanon did. (Fanon did not
argue that the Arab didn't understand the Frenchman because they had
different cultural views; he, instead maintained that the Arab, and by
extension all Third World people wanted just what the Frenchmen/European
had [in this case, the rightful possessions of the peoples of the Third
World.])
I do not mean to limit our choices to these two possibilities and I
recognize that there are critical problems in Franz Fanon's
formulations, but I do think we start by seeing how far back we have
fallen in 45 years and then push forward from there.
What do the rest of you think?
_______________________________________________
Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org)
[email protected]
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