M&D, history and afro-germans

Fri Jul 12 17:09:12 CDT 2002

on cultural exchanges nobody ever heard of in history classes, i would
highly recommend the book "in an antique land" by amitav gosh
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679727833/ref%3Dpd_sim_books/104-9797545-9503105
different story, similar issue. who in hell knew about the relations
between india and egypt before friendly western colonizers connected
them? well, actually who cared?  nobody. we discovered this world,
didn't we. when we learn about history in france, it goes from sumer
to egypt, greece and rome, but when we talk about greece we basically
don't learn anything about persia. hey, that's not where the western
world came out, now, is it? those people were the original barbarians,
greeks were democrats. so there. we draw a straight line from rome to
the blonde barbarians that gave france its name though. it' ok, they
were from around here, i guess.

i do agree with malignD that afrocentrists go way too far and just
make up stuff, there is still very true and interesting facts to get
from afrocentrist literature, mainly that there were black people
in egypt, you know. hey, not so long ago, nobody cared
that liz taylor played cleopatra in a movie, if you see what i mean.
and in the end i do agree with the quote doug took from M&D. history
should be, and sometimes is, about truth.but mostly it is about whoever's powerful
enough to control history, and what they deem worthy of use which will
then be emphasized. so, as i was saying, not so long ago, we'd learn in class
about our ancestors the gauls, even in the french west indies... and how their civilization comes in a
straight line from the egyptians', the greeks', and the romans'. of
course this isn't totally wrong. but it is not totally true either,
and it is totally political- just as ANY historical view on anything.
you get away with it when your historical view is the ruling view.

oh and about a forgotten part of modern history that somehow relates
to pynchon: the original schwarzkommando if you want, check this out:

http://www.ushmm.org/topics/article.utp?Id=10005479
in french: http://www.awigp.com/default.asp?numcat=afrogerman

DM> I point you to M&D, where Pynchon treats the issue you raise, in some
DM> depth.  Here's a starting point:

DM> "Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever
DM> a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.  History
DM> is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it  Remembrance,
DM> for Remembrance belongs to the People.  History can as little pretend to
DM> the Veracity of the one as claim the Power of the other,-- her
DM> Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc,spy,
DM> andTaproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back
DM> into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,-- not a
DM> Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a
DM> great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong,
DM> vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."
DM> (M&D, 349)

DM> At 3:54 PM -0400 7/12/02, MalignD at aol.com wrote:
>>Perhaps you can explain to me how "a deeper truth, a bigger more
>>comprehensive kind of 'history'" can be mined from the patently preposterous
>>and grossly ahistorical.

DM> ...

DM> The New York Review of Books
DM> June 15, 1989

DM> Review

DM> Who Are These Coming to the Sacrifice?

DM> By Jasper Griffin

DM> Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1:
DM> The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985
DM> by Martin Bernal
DM> Rutgers University Press, 575 pp., $15.00 (paper)

DM> [...]
DM> The book makes two central assertions. The first is that the ancient Greeks
DM> themselves said that their country had received settlers from Egypt in the
DM> distant past, and that their mathematics, philosophy, and religion were in
DM> vital measure derived from Egypt and to a lesser degree from Phoenicia.
DM> That is the "Ancient Model," which is in fact true. The second assertion is
DM> that this model, long accepted, has in the last two centuries been denied
DM> and replaced by an "Aryan Model," which asserts that the Greeks, an
DM> Indo-European people of invaders from the north, may or may not have
DM> learned various things from the East but learned nothing of importance from
DM> Egypt. This has happened, Bernal argues, because the racist thought of
DM> Europe and North America could not accept that the Greeks could have been
DM> conquered or instructed by Africans. Some scholars denied the Eastern
DM> influence, too, out of anti-Semitism; others found a way of accepting it
DM> which insisted that the important Easterners were not Semites. For these
DM> scholars either Sumerians or Iranians are the favored peoples, so far as
DM> influence on Greece is concerned.

DM> [...]

DM> It is a spectacle both comical and depressing to see the unself-conscious
DM> way in which historians, both inside and outside universities, reflect the
DM> prejudices of their times in their subject matter. Bernal has some
DM> excellent discussions here, for instance on the historian Barthold Georg
DM> Niebuhr and on Matthew Arnold. About Arnold he writes:

DM> Where Dr. [Thomas] Arnold's love of Greece meshed with his Protestantism,
DM> Teutonism and anti-Semitism, his son's Hellenism was explicitly linked to
DM> the vision of the Indo-European or Aryan race in a perpetual struggle with
DM> the Semitic one, or to the conflict between "cultivated" and bourgeois
DM> values. And in this, of course, he was following a well-beaten path. In
DM> theory-like Michelet, Renan and others-he accepted, as Bunsen put it, that
DM> "If the Hebrew Semites are the priests of humanity, the Helleno-Roman
DM> Aryans are, and ever will be, its heroes." All, however, clearly felt that
DM> in granting the Semites religion they were granting them too much.

DM> [...]

DM>  The negative parts of Bernal's book show how often scholars have confused
DM> facts and value judgments; the positive part exemplifies the same relation
DM> in a different way. With so much at stake, in self-definition and racial
DM> pride, it is likely that the struggle over the identities and the relations
DM> among Greeks, Egyptians, Semites, and black Africans will be a long one.

-- 
Best regards,
 alfredjprufrock                            mailto:alfredjprufrock at club-internet.fr