That's a fantastic response, Keith. Actually I agree with you about
culture: be against it! That's my understanding of counter-culture:
accent on the counter, not on the culture. Your words on two-way
relations are moving. What else to do with one's life? Of course I am
more pessimisstic because I'm living in a falling Empire, and my
understanding of climate change suggests that everything goes down with
it. No way to know for sure about that one...
I'm curious what you'll make of Get Out. The US right now is a very
complicated psychodrama, gripping when you're in it, probably quite
inscrutable from the outside.
good luck and finish that book about 2100!
Brian
On 12/30/2017 06:01 AM, Keith Hart wrote:
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
<http://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 <mailto: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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