MDDM more background for Gershom

[barbara100 at jps.net]

"...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."

We're still doing that Right and Left!

As for the knee-jerk reaction, I think it's probably this:

> "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. [...]"

It reminds me of the imaginable ways some P-listers erase and make invisible
parts of Pynchon they can't square with their conscience.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2002 3:42 PM
Subject: MDDM more background for Gershom


> 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. [...]
>