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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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Where is the French Obama?
Thoughts for Today
By
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Dillard University
My friend Jessica B. Harris, a scholar of
culinary cultures, sent me an English
translation of Guy Numa's article "Where is the
French Obama?" I welcome this new ingredient
for the benign genocide soup I am cooking.
Numa's opening sentences signify powerfully on
the deceptiveness of French thought:
There is something hypocritical in the "Obamania"
that is sweeping France: Obama, Black, young and
un-cunning, is the archetype of the kind of
person that the French political class
invariably fails to produce. This is typical in
France, where one likes to extol the merits of
recipes from abroad without doing anything to
concoct them "at home."
Only those who live in France and its overseas
departments can provide a fair response to
Numa's implicit questions. But I, an outsider,
an etranger, will hazard an unfair one.
As an American, I believe there is not now, nor
will there ever be, a "French Obama." Barack
Obama is, if we recall words from William Carlos
Williams, a pure product of America, a
Harvard-polished product. One does not concoct
an Obama. One grows him. And despite the
success Richard Wright had in growing American
vegetables in French soil, French dirt is not
manured for nurturing what the American
post-colonial plantation can in abundance.
Like the United States, France has a long
history of speaking with the forked tongue of
666. Both nations are racist. Both dress ideas
about democracy in fine political costumes, the
French ones being more expertly tailored than
the American. Do not inspect too closely the
underwear that the costumes mask. The merde,
the ca ca will shock you.
Hypocrisy is fundamentally different in France
and in the United States. It is not easy to
decide which is more vicious, especially as the
American brand has Eurocentric features.
Non-Americans embrace Obama in just the fashion
the British and the French embraced the tragic
Sara Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus."
Many American gliberals have conceptualized
Obama as the great white hope who will sanction
the erasure of history and give credibility to
the post-post-modernity of post-race. But even
those enthralled by myth and fairytale would do
will to be more critical of Obama's foggy
success and of McCain's threatening presence.
Consider that nothing is essentially serious in
contemporary politics except the rising cost of
living. It is all obscene carnival, a forecast
of the damnation of the earth.
No doubt 2008 is a miracle year in the history
of the United States, a death-bound year. The
miracle is oddly negative. Beware as bad faith
ascends. I would say to Professor Numa that it
is not surprising that a "phenomenon" like Obama
has not occurred in France. In the swamps of
racism and sexism and classism, it is well known
that no French woman who has mated with an
African has given birth to an Obama. Why would
she want to do so?
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Where is the French Obama?—The practice of
conferring ministerial posts on Blacks (Caribbean or Africans) or to
people of North African origin is nothing new: others who come to mind
are Léon Bertrand [former tourism minister who is French Guyanese],
Roger Bambuck [former minister of youths and sports], and former
secretary of state for integration Kofi Yamgnane [French Togolese … ]
During the waning years of the colonial era,
personalities like [the first president of Senegal] Léopold Sédar
Senghor in 1955-56, [former assistant secretary of state] Hammadoun
Dicko in 1957, Modibo Keita in 1956-57 were also named ministers. Keita
even became Vice President of the National Assembly. One can also
include, among others, Gabriel Lisette, councilor-minister to between
1959 and 1961—or a woman, Nafissa Cid Sara—between 1957 and 1962.
It's therefore urgent and necessary to redouble the
discussion about the scope of Obama’s candidacy. In this connection, I
must concede my surprise at the relative silence of the Representative
Council of Black Associations. I would have liked to hear the
organization explain the meaning of Obama’s candidacy for Blacks in
France. In any case, I expected more than a press release.
WorldMeets
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Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity And Activism (David
Beriss)—In
Urban France About 337,000 people of French Antillean Origin live in
metropolitan France today. Unlike immigrants from North Africa, Turkey
or sub-Saharan Africa, Antilleans are French citizens with deep roots in
French history. Indeed, the Caribbean Islands they come from have been a
part of France for over three centuries. Antilleans were for many years
an invisible population, dispersed throughout the Paris region, with few
community organizations and little political activism. Beginning in the
early 1980s, however, activists in the Antillean community began to
recognize that their status as citizens would not protect them from the
growth of racism in France. From neighborhood groups interested in
promoting traditional Martinican and Guadeloupan dance and music to
politically charged associations, these new cultural militants denounced
French colonialism, challenged racism, and demanded political
representation. Black Skins, French Voices is situated at the
intersection of changing French ideas and policies regarding ethnic
diversity and Antillean demands for recognition. It shows the creative
and exciting struggles of Antilleans to remake French culture on their
own terms.
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Where is the Israeli Obama?—We can respond to that only with
embarrassed silence. We cannot point to anyone in the Israeli political
arena who is ready to take on this task.
But an optimist will give another
answer: only yesterday you did not have an Obama either. He appeared,
because something happened deep down in the "national psyche" of the
United States. There was an expectation and there was a longing for a
person who would speak the language of hope, audacity, change. And when
he appeared, the indifferent public rose and followed him
enthusiastically. All the more so because the situation was bad and it
was clear that the old road just leads to worse.
That can happen here, too. Our
Obama can appear suddenly when there is a demand for him. When people
get finally fed up with all those politicians, devoid of vision and
courage, who pack our stage today. When the demand for change is so
strong that it passes from the phase of griping at Sabbath-eve parties
to the phase of mobilization and deeds. Then it will become clear that
we, too, have a young generation and that our indifferent public can
change radically.
The victory of the American Obama
may well give a big push to the emergence of an Israeli Obama, hopefully
as charming as the original. The victory in America should mean for us,
paraphrasing a Hebrew poet: If there is an Israeli Obama, let him appear
at once!
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 16 August 2008
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