MDDM more background for Gershom

[Doug Millison]

I'm still not sure I quite understand the knee-jerk reaction against
Walker; in the introduction to her recent book, she offers some
observations that don't seem particularly outrageous, and it's a
perspective that I think is worth looking at as we read Pynchon, where we
find many echoes.  Pynchon does like to focus on those overlooked and
forgotten threads in the larger historical tapestry.

If it's her politics that offend....

The introduction to her book is online at www.rowmanlittlefield.com, search
for the book and go to the samples:


_African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas_
Edited by Sheila S. Walker

Introduction
Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/Righting the Pan-American Discourse
Sheila S. Walker

African Contributions to the Americas-and to the Story of the Americas

[...] The contributions of Africans and their descendants to Pan-American
life are so central and foundational that there is no way of discussing the
Americas accurately and honestly without considering them. They were part
of the agriculture that allowed the voluntary European and involuntary
African immigrants to survive. They were part of the technology that
allowed everyone to work and create. They were part of the economy that
allowed the societies to develop and expand. They were part of the creation
of the languages in which everyone learned to communicate. They were part
of the definition of the nature of the spiritual, and of how to access and
relate to it. They were part of the creation of all of the myriad cultural
systems, forms, and styles in which all African and European immigrant
Americans organized themselves and expressed their identities.

Africans and their descendents waged the struggles necessary to free
themselves from their enslavers and participated actively in the battles to
free their enslavers from their European colonial rulers. Hence they were a
formative part of the very definition of freedom and justice in the
Americas. And although they were brought to the Americas only to work, and
worked _de sol a so_(from "kin to cain't"), they also taught the Americas
how to celebrate life.

>From the beginning of the European invasion and conquest of Native American
territory, Europeans brought along Africans who, albeit involuntarily,
participated integrally in the creation of the Americas with: their
dominant demographic presence, and economic contributions, their
specialized knowledge and skills, their enduring principles and attitudes,
their influential tastes and preferences, and their profound understanding
of life and insistence upon living it as joyously as possible. As
foundational constituents of all of the societies of the Americas-although
as unequal constituents who worked much more and benefited much less than
Euro-Americans-they helped determine the basic forms these societies have
taken and the ways in which they function today.

To understand the Americas it is, therefore, necessary to assume and
acknowledge that these African contributions are part of their deep
structure; and that as such they continue to express themselves in many
ways seen and unseen, named and unnamed, somewhat known and mostly still to
be known. This volume offers the beginning of an antidote to the inherently
incomplete Eurocentric version of the Pan-American story.

The volume represents a fundamental challenge to the way in which the story
of the Americas has been told, as if Africans and their descendants had not
been the basis of the labor that made the development of both the Americas
and Western Europe possible, and as if much of the cultural repertoire of
everyone in the Americas were not of African/African Diasporan origin. The
African and African Diasporan scholars and politico-cultural leaders and
other conscientious scholars represented here offer new data about the
African Diaspora from Buenos Aires to New York City, data from old sources
such as new readings of historical documents, and data from unexpected
sources such as the lives of long-deceased individuals. They also offer new
perspectives on old sources of knowledge such as everyday language and the
knowledge encoded in dance. And they uncover the Afrogenic nature of much
culture unquestioningly assumed to be Eurogenic, such as U.S. canonical
literature and elite concert dance. They, in essence, contradict and
correct much of the prevailing story of the Americas.

This volume also represents the beginning of a comparative analysis of
African Diasporan societies and phenomena from an Afrogenic perspective
that focuses on African and African Diasporan agency, participation, and
contributions. It represents a beginning of an attempt to respond to what
might reasonably be considered the fundamental problem in the real
understanding of the Americas. That problem, which is the result of an
apparently deliberate distortion of the portrayal of historical reality in
order to justify an unconscionable social system, is that of acknowledging
the role of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the creation of the
Americas.

Such an acknowledgment involves confronting the intellectual
tradition/contradiction of justifying how good Christians could treat other
humans in the inhuman ways that history makes obvious, while at the same
time pretending to create democratic republics. A flagrant example of this
fundamental contradiction was defining human beings not as people but as
chattel like pigs and cows, or as pieces of ebony, and claiming that they
were uncivilized, while simultaneously "recruiting" these very same people
specifically for their sophisticated technological knowledge in such
fundamental survival areas as agriculture and mining, putting them in
charge of growing and preparing food, and even entrusting them with the
responsibility of taking care of the privileged children of their enslavers.

African American historian John Henrik Clarke said, "You cannot subjugate a
man and recognize his humanity, his history and his personality. Europeans
and Euro-Americans subjugated Africans and their descendants and denied
their/our humanity, history, and personality. Denial, however, does not
make things go away, even if it may intellectually exclude or obscure
problematic presences. Such denial rather obliges the deniers to lie, to
dissimulate, about the presence of the subject of the denial in a variety
of ways, such as "origin unknown," with or without Eurocentric
misattribution. It requires imaginative styles of erasure and
invisibilization such as writing African and African Diasporan subjects of
denial out of selected parts of the story by simply whiting us out. [...]