MDDM "The Rabbit in the moon"

[Doug Millison]

"My quest to understand the African basis of U.S. African culture during my
undergraduate studies was no nly not encouraged, but was actively
discouraged and even ridiculed by professors responsible for the evolution
of my intellectual orientation. When I told my academic advisor how pleased
I was to have come across Melville Herskovits'z _The Myth of the Negro
Past_, which provided extensive African and African Diasporan data to
support the idea that U.S. African Americans have an African heritage, he
summarly dismissed such ideas as "rubbish." That is the kind of statement
that sticks in your mind, especially comin from someone responsible for
your academic success and hence yoru future career.  Although the details
vary, I know that my experience of the denial of the African presence in
the Americas was not unique among African Diasporans in academia seeking to
discover and defend an Afrogenic perspective on our own lives."

--Sheila Walker
_African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas_
Sheila S. Walker, ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 2001

"Sheila S. Walker is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and the
Annabel Irion Worsham Centenennial Professor in the College of Liberal Arts
at the University of Texas Austin."
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/
CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0742501655  (watch the url wrap)



At 2:25 PM -0400 7/12/02, MalignD at aol.com wrote:
>heila Walker is
>an Afrocentrist, with all that implies; i.e., at least at this stage of
>things, a field of study many of the claims of which are grossly ahistorical
>and patently preposterous.
>She is apparently not terribly consistent either.  In addition to her
comments on slavery as noted by Millison, she also has said, "We need to stop
talking about slaves. I don't believe in slaves."  And, "The wealth of the
Americas and the western world-all the Peri-Atlantic world, was created by
Africans."


Walker:

[...] Harris attributes the pervasive ignorance of the global nature of the
African presence to stereotypes of Africans as inferior, without a
meaningful history, and uncivilized and so incapable of having contributed
to world civilization. Functioning as unquestioned premises promoting the
maintenance of theories that discount the possibility that Africans have
been major actors in the creation of the Atlantic world, these myths
persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Such myths account for
the scholarly tendency that Dodson and Inikori cite, to simply ignore the
central role of enslaved Africans in the development of the Atlantic world.
[...]

"[...] Along this line, the dearth of "slaves," as opposed to "enslaved
Africans" or "enslaved people," in a volume on the African Diaspora is
perhaps worthy of comment. This terminological preference corresponds to
Mullings's observation concerning the discussion of slavery on terms other
than our own. She notes that she and other African American students
"squirmed with discomfort and embarrassment" when slavery was presented in
U.S. history lessons, "knowing something was wrong, but bereft of the
knowledge that could empower us." As presented, "the slaves were clearly
pitiful things without history, volition, or agency." Only later did she
become conscious that, "describing [them] as 'enslaved' (by someone) rather
than 'slaves' (an inherent state of being) shifts the burden of culpability
and transgression."

"The terminological choice expressed here refuses to collaborate in the
reification of a condition that has been given the connotation, with
scholarly collusion, of representing the entire existence of enslaved
African and African Diasporan human beings. Although that may have been the
intention of their enslavers, it was clearly not a result to which enslaved
people acquiesced. This linguistic overhaul also conveys an assertion of a
sense of the volition and agency of people who, albeit living in lifetime
bondage, were actively engaged in re-creating their identities and in
creating new dynamic cultures that have helped to define both the Americas
and contemporary global society.


I doubt that everybody shares  Malign's reactionary opinion, and not
Pynchon judging from the loving way he treats the African American cultural
heritage in all his writings, including M&D:


[[
"Hey Gersh, do the one about the Crocodile that can talk."
"The Rabbit in the Moon!"
--M&D, p. 573

Pynchon chooses a folk tale with global roots:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22The+Rabbit+in+the+Moon%22&
btnG=Google+Search  (watch the url wrap)

http://www.halfmoon.org/moon.html


http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov1999/rabbitinthemoon/index.html

http://www.rabbit.org/journal/1/history-of-easter.html

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/6100/hist.html
"In all cultures the rabbit or hare has been an archetype of swift action.
Many of us know of the Cherokee Rabbit and the Zambian rabbit Kalulu who
form the basis of Brer rabbit as well as Bugs' Bunny. In these tales we see
the rabbit as a messenger, running against the wind and chewing on wood (a
judgement element) in his path. Many tales around the world show the
competition of the rabbit with beings of these elements as well as with
other creatures.  "
]]

Walker continues:

"Her discussion of the African origins of elements of U.S. popular culture,
well exemplified by cartoon character Bugs Bunny, points up several
dynamics concerning the nonwhite origins of an all-American figure, origins
that have broader applications and implications. Bugs Bunny, as it turns
out, appears to be a mainstreamized version of the African American Br'er
Rabbit. Part of the hare cycle common to the West African savanna and
Sahelian areas, the stories, with the hare transformed into a rabbit,
retained their educational and entertaining virtues in the African American
oral tradition. They were collected and put into the written tradition by
white Americans who popularized them as mass culture. So the hip,
jive-talking transgressive rabbit began his trajectory from black to white
by coming to the Americas in the African oral tradition that was the basis
of the African American oral tradition. When Br'er Rabbit was recast as
Bugs Bunny and commercialized as an all-American icon, he quietly lost his
"blackness" in the process, and his "whiteness" (okay, grayness) became
assumed. "


And continues again:

" [...] This pattern of forgetting, ignoring, denying, failing to see the
Africanity of cultural elements that get appropriated as part of the
national cultures of the Americas is a frequent theme in this volume. The
Afrogenic nature of things gets "lost" as they become part of presumably
white, Eurogenic, national cultures. Their African ancestry is not denied,
because that would involve acknowledging the possibility of its original
presence. It is rather forgotten, is quietly "disappeared," becomes
"unknown," in an amnesia of former blackness, induced and enforced by
authoritative voices of assumed whiteness.

"[...] The issue here, as echoed throughout this volume, is that those of
us in the Americas who have not had the privilege of defining what
constitutes knowledge, are suggesting that we know something special and
have something new to bring to this defining, especially when discussing
our own communities' experiences. And what we have to reveal, as those who
are hip to the jive have already perceived, is very often "hidden in plain
view."


H.I.P.S., a phrase not unknown to Pynchon readers.