Hi Brian,
Afro-pessimism has had its vogue in Africa too, especially in the decades
around the millennium. Its protagonists are still around, but less blatant
than before, not least in France. Stephen Smith won the Prix essai 2004
France Televisions for Negrologie: pourquoi l'Afrique meurt (why Africa is
dying). Negrologie is a pun on necrologie (obituaries). Macron puts the lie
to this when he said recently that France would not deal with African
countries whose women have six children on average. 51% of the population
is under 20 years old. You think they have heard of Afro-pessimism? In 1900
Europe had a quarter of the world's population despite mass emigration,
Africa 7.5%. In 2100 the forecast is that Africans will have 40% of the
world's population (now 15%), Asia 42% (now 60%), Europe 6%. The Asian
manufacturers are already preparing for the time soon when Africans will
constitute the most buoyant sector of world market demand. The West is in
denial about its own inevitable decline, beginning with Europe, and white
racism grows accordingly.
It is not a question of forgetting our humanity.Humanity is the sum of all
human beings who have lived, live and will live; a quality of kindness
accorded to people of our own kind ("kin"); and a project of becoming
individually and collectively human that has barely begun, thanks in large
part to the world society that the West made and still seeks to control.
Being human isn't a lost paradise, but a prize we need to figure out how to
get. With that in mind, I have co-direct a Human Economy Programme in South
Africa for seven years so far. We have produced six books whose titles
include Human Economy: A Citizen's Guide; Economy For and Against
Democracy; Money in a Human Economy.
I first heard about Get Out last year when my American liberal academic
friends considered it a must see. I checked it out on imdb.com and decided
it was not for me. I already had y bellyful of Afro-pessimism and have been
writing a book against it for more than a decade, Africa 2100: A History of
the Future. Your short review reminds me that I ought to see it. At least I
can buy the DVD now. If ideas about becoming human need some work, nothing
dissuades me from my long-held belief that culture is a deeply reactionary
concept whose twin parents (the early modern European courts and German
xenophobic nationalism) encourage inhumanity as the product of an
inescapable dead hand on its bearers. In South Africa and elsewhere,
culture has succeeded race as the universal excuse for not adhering to the
law or even to basic humanism. Read Breidenbach and Nyiri Seeing culture
everywhere; from genocide to consumer habits (2009).
When I landed in an Accra slum at 22, I knew that if I succumbed to the
prevailing cultural stereotypes -- I was white, rich, educated, powerful;
they were black, poor, illiterate and largely powerless -- my research
would be dead and maybe me with it. We gradually built two-way social
relations based on human exchange in the widest sense. I desperately
needed what they had in abundance: human warmth, eating and drinking
together, playing their games badly. There were lots of mistakes,
especially on my part, but I lived there for over two years. I came to
believe that all social relations start from unequal premises from some
perspectives, of which parent-child is the prototype, but we have it in us
to try to make them more equal. That is what becoming human means to me.
K
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:09 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com
> wrote:
> "You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to
> fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall?"
>
> With these questions, director Jordan Peele asks *you* to explain the real
> horror of his box-office sensation, "Get Out."
> capitalist democracies, staring into screens as the climate changes.
>
> "Get Out" - like all Afro-Pessimism - is about the impossibility of
> reforming the cultures of domination. And so awakening is no seduction, but
> it does mean embracing the fall of Empire. Or that's how my sliver-of-self
> sees it. Horror as a call to counter-culture.
>
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