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Books by Floyd W.
Hayes, III
A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African
American Studies /
Forty
Acres and a Mule: The Rape of Colored Americans
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Black
Education and Afro-Pessimism
By
Dr. Floyd Hayes,
III
I recall some years
ago before he died, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)
saying that until the continent of Africa was free,
Black people nowhere would be free. Africa, like many
Blacks in the African Diaspora, remains the captive of
external forces. Yet, like the figures of
Ward Connerly,
Clarence Thomas, or
Condoleeza Rice, a certain amount of
collusion takes place. Although national flags fly over
the capitals of every African nation, suggesting
independence and popular freedom, there is much unfreedom, chaos, and despair among the people. How do
we explain or understand the contradictions of African
independence today?
There is a good amount of rethinking going on within
global African and African-descended communities. Just
yesterday, I was reading
Elias Kifon Bongmba. 2006.
The Dialectic of Transformation in Africa. New York:
Palgrave/Macmillan. He is from Cameroon. He, like many
other African intellectuals, is trying to make sense of
a growing sense of "Afro-pessimism" that plagues the
African continent. For him, the African crisis is the
result of a number of internal factors: the
privatization of power by African elites, the
pauperization of the state, the prodigalization of the
state, and the proliferation of violence. As solution
to these internal contradictions, Bongmba call for a
shift from pessimism to optimism, love and a new
humanism.
We live in tragic
times. Recall, Cornel West's essay on nihilism in Black
American communities in his book,
Race Matters.
Isn't it similar to the African sorrow songs of
Afro-pessimism? But I am critical of the solely internal
gaze that merely blames the victim. Being hopeless,
helpless, and unloved become the major characteristics
of this nihilist threat, according to West. Is there
another way of looking at the ascent of nihilism in the
present historical moment? Much like Bongmba, West
calls for the love ethic as a solution. Why didn't he
call for whites to end anti-Black racism? The exclusive
internal gaze doesn't challenge European neocolonialism
in Africa any more than it challenges white supremacy in
the USA. Please see my critique of West in
"Afro-Nihilism: A Reconsideration," in
Cornel West: A
Critical Reader, edited by George Yancy.
In the process, Bongmba mentions the important
scholar,
Mahmood
Mamdani's important book,
Citizen
and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (1996). I also would suggest Mamdani's
later book,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,
Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001). And
then there is
Manthia
Diawara's cultural criticism of
contemporary Africa, entitled In Search of Africa
(1998). All of these studies focus on Afro-pessimism in
one way or another.
Self-criticism
always is good, but it cannot be the only manner of
criticism. Yet, this is a good bit of what is taking
place today. Many African leaders, particularly
military leaders, have seized state power and are
wielding it abusively. But then, power knows no ethics.
Power is about power! How have African elites gained
such power, how do they continue to rule, and in whose
interest do they really rule? In my humble judgment,
the analysis of internal contradictions alone won't help
to answer these questions sufficiently.
Long before he died, Ghanaian leader
Kwame Nkrumah
talked and wrote about neocolonialism. He hoped for
something like a united states of Africa—independents
states that worked for the collective development of the
continent's people. Perhaps his downfall occurred, as Bongmba suggests, because he attempted to
accomplish his aims through the use of a single
political party. OK, so the one-party state has been
problematic in Africa. But then, there also are
multi-party configurations. Conflict, severe conflict,
remains.
Way back in the late 1960s, as a graduate student at
UCLA (working on an M.A. degree in African Studies), I
was interested in the African struggle for independence
and its aftermath and the acceptance of European-carved
state boundaries. The argument among my professors and
other white/western scholars was that independent
African nations should yield to those state boundaries.
But those state boundaries often went counter to the
configurations of African nationalities. It was said
that Africans should yield to those boundaries so as not
to give rise to small states that supposedly would not
be able to sustain themselves for whatever reason. But
look at Luxembourg in Europe! I recall thinking that
those European-carved boundaries would cause unforeseen
contradictions in the years to come. Why?
Well, prior to 1914, there was no Nigeria! The
Yoruba,
Igbo,
Hausa-Fulani were all separate nations. Now, that
didn't necessarily mean that there was always peace
within or among these nations, but to force them into
one state set in motion, after independence, long
lasting contradictions and dilemmas. The Yoruba, Igbo,
Hausa-Fulani, and other nationalities in contemporary
Nigeria historically were different people with
different cultures, political arrangements, etc., before
Europeans arrived. But sure enough, on the eve of
Nigerian independence—actually, Nigeria should have
become independent before Ghana—a power struggle began
between Yorubas and Igbos over who would rule the
Nigerian state. Yoruba leader, Awolowo, and
Igbo
leader, Azikiwe, fought it out in the 1950s. Although
independence came, these internal contradictions were
not settled. Then the
Nigerian-Biafra war emerged in
the late 1960s. Nigeria withstood the Igbo nation
challenge, but those contractions only mirrored the
dilemmas that would plague Nigeria and other African
nations well into the 21st century.
My argument, then, is that the acceptance of
European-carved boundaries set in motion a great amount
of the present conflict in Africa. The struggle for
power among leaders of opposing nationalities has
resulted in the privatization of power within certain
nationalist (read "tribal") leaders in opposition to
other nationalities (read tribes). So, there is
genocide. I often wonder what would have happened if
the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, and other nationalities
in Nigeria had decided to return the pre-colonial
national or independent or separate status. Suppose the
Kikuyu,
Luo,
Masai and others remained independent or
separate after independence? The question could be
pertinent for nations throughout the continent of
Africa. My point is that although present internal
contradictions are real, they may have their origins in
external forces, which continue to gnaw at the very
existence of Africans on the continent and their
descendants in the Diaspora.
Just quickly. Suppose in year 2010 China colonizes the
USA and Canada and forces them into one state. By 2030,
the USA and Canada fight for and win back their
independence. Would they remain one state or would
they go back to their pre-colonial separate nation-state
existence? What do you think would happen?
Why are we trying so hard to forget the long history of
Africa? We don't have to be adherents of Afrocentricity
to reject misconceptions of Africa and to value the
significance of African antiquity. Memory establishes
identity. And like the blues, memory helps us remember
those who did us wrong!
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Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling / The Myth of Charter
Schools
Hunger for a Black President / Biko
Speaks on Africans
/
Introduction I Write What I Like
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Afro- Pessimism
By
Frank B. Wilderson
“Afro-Pessimists are framed as such . . . because they
theorize an antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e.,
they perform a kind of ‘work of understanding’ rather
than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly
untenable solutions to the problems they raise.”
“[The
Afro-Pessimists argue] that violence toward the black
person happens gratuitously, hence without former
transgression, and the even if the means of repression
change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that
doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself.
Finally (and this is important in terms of the
self-definition of the white person), a lot of
repression happens on the level of representation, which
then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and
the white person . . . Since these structures are
ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of
changing this unless the world as we know it comes an
end. . . .); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist
relational-schema] would be seen as the only true
antagonism (while other repressive relations like class
and gender would take place on the level of
conflict—they can be resolved, hence they are not
ontological).”
“[The
Afro-Pessimists] work toward delineating a relation
rather than focus on a cultural object.”
“Something that all
the Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social
death are notions of kinship (or lack there of), the
absence of time and space to describe blackness. . . .
There is no grammar of suffering to describe their loss
because the loss cannot be named.”
“[The
Afro-Pessimists] theorize the workings of civil society
as contiguous with slavery, and discuss the following as
bearing witness to this contiguity: the inability of the
slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate space
into place and time into event; the fact that the slave
remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than
violence contingent on transgression); the natal
alienation and social death of the slave.”
“[T]he
Afro-Pessimists all seek to . . . stage a metacritique
of the current discourse identified as “critical theory”
by excavating an antagonism that exceeds it; to
recognize this antagonism forces a mode of death that
expels subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].”
“For Fanon, the
solution to the black presence in the white world is not
to retrieve and celebrate our African heritage, as was
one of the goals of the Negritude project. For Fanon, a
revolution that would destroy civil society, as we know
it would be a more adequate response. I think the
Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott
would argue there is no place for the black, only
prosthetics, techniques which give the illusion of a
relationality in the world.”
Like the work of
Jared Sexton,
Saidiya Hartman,
David Marriott,
Hortense Spillers,
Frantz Fanon,
Lewis Gordon,
Joy James, and others, Wilderson’s poetry, creative
prose, scholarly work, and film production are
predicated on the notion that slavery did not end in
1865; the United States simply made adjustments to the
force of Black resistance without diminishing the
centrality of Black captivity to the stability and
coherence of civil society.—Incognegro
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Existentia Africana
Understanding Africana Existential Thought
By
Lewis Ricardo Gordon
The
intellectual history of the last quarter of
this century has been marked by the growing
influence of Africana thought—an area of
philosophy that focuses on issues raised by
the struggle over ideas in African cultures
and their hybrid forms in Europe, the
Americas, and the Caribbean.
Existentia Africana is an engaging
and highly readable introduction to the
field of Africana philosophy and will help
to define this rapidly growing field. Lewis
R. Gordon clearly explains Africana
existential thought to a general audience,
covering a wide range of both classic and
contemporary thinkers—from Douglass and Du
Bois to Fanon. |
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Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
By
Lewis R. Gordon
Lewis
Gordon presents the first detailed
existential phenomenological investigation
of anti-black racism as a form of Sartrean
bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which
human beings attempt to evade freedom and
responsibility, is treated as a constant
possibility of human existence. Anti-black
racism, the attitude and practice that
involve the construction of black people as
fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is
examined as an effort to evade the
responsibilities of a human and humane
world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad
faith militates against any human science
that is built upon a theory of human nature
and as such offers an analysis of anti-black
racism that stands as a challenge to our
ordinary assumptions of what it means to be
human. |
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa
Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on Africans writing and
accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A teacher,
psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
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The White Architects of Black Education
Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954
By
William Watkins
William H.
Watkins is subtle in his story of the “white
architects” who developed Black education
beginning in 1865, just at the end of the Civil
War. Watkins shocks you with his “scientific
racism” platform that he explains “presented
human difference as the rational for inequality”
and that it “can be understood as an ideological
and political issue” (pg. 39). The reader senses
a calm attitude about the author as he speaks of
the philanthropists, beginning with John D.
Rockefeller, Sr, who was most concerned about
“shaping the new industrial social order” (pg.
133) than he was for providing a useful
education. “The Rockefeller group demonstrated
how gift giving could shape education and public
policy” (pg. 134). |
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In their support
of Black education, by 1964, the General Education Board (GEB)
spent more than $3.2 million dollars in gifts to support
Black education. This captivating book begins with a
foreword written by Robin D.G. Kelley who reflects that he
learned one lesson from Watkins, “If we are to create new
models of pedagogy and intellectual work and become
architects of our own education, then we cannot simply
repair the structures that have been passed down to us. We
need to dismantle the old architecture so that we might
begin anew” (pg. xiii). Why don’t the school reformers who
mandate educational laws experience such an awakening?—Review
by AC Snow
Source:
Cre3Design
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posted 11 March 2008
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