i'm having a hard time pulling together the threads of Ioan Davies' article. after the poem by Amie Cesaire, the first line reads, "The debate around the origins and history of religion is at the heart of the reexamination of the idea of Aricica..." Is it in encountering the text as something to be "unraveled" that points us to a history of Christianity and Western colonialism? is the fetish as play, rather than a false mistake, a way to displace this dominance? How is the fetish connected to a rereading by "rediscover[ing] the black presence in the existing text." (p. 130). page 136 reads, "Ochieng's rationalist campaign is portrayed in a fierce missionary rhetoric," but how so? - in, "realizing the nature of the national and international power structure itself."? (earlier, same page). Is it in the elitism that exists by virtue of it being in a language available only to a small minority? what is happening on page 141, when we are told, "The gun is not a fetish... but a metaphor for someone who has noting else to do but blast someone else's head off. The American black.." and so on. i assumed this was a critique on the dominant ways in which the term 'fetish' is used, but at the end of the paragraph Davies writes, "In this, the common storytelling becomes part of the music and the music part of the personal image." totally confused. confused confused.
~ em
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Again, here is my really long deconstruction of the text.
Definitions (these helped me decipher some of the text):
Fetish: an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression (merriam-webster)
Hermeneutics: essentially, hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as art or sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary. (wikipedia)
Interstices: a space that intervenes between things ; especially : one between closely spaced things -interstices of a wall- b: a gap or break in something generally continuous -the interstices of society- (merriam-webster)
Analysis:
Article was concerned with a general breakdown between three different viewpoints of African thought and then later how these viewpoints can be used to deconstruct the social construction of African and the creation of a Pan-African identity:
1. Mudimbe, who seeks to deconstruct the world through understanding the social construction of that world and how that affect the textuality and symbolic nature of that world. How the very library, the books, the meanings can be broken down using the very words that are used to define them.
2. Appiah who places importance on the social construction of the African as a ‘constant other’, as someone who is defined through otherness and how that ‘otherness’, especially within intellectual thought, faces a middle ground of having to deconstruct the social construction of the other to fellow Africans and to ‘other’ non-Africans. (129)
Within this, there is a space of living ‘within the cracks’ of defining and analyzing worlds from a space not apart from and not a part of.
3. “It rediscovers the black presence in the existing text. It operates in the “in-between spaces” to create a narrative continuity. This is not simply saying that we were there before, but that we have been continuously present whenever God needed us. . . By seeing blacks everywhere always as operating b/w the cracks, the texts can move from being hegemonic, to interstitial.”
This idea that there just doesn’t have to be interpretations of the other either through existing texts, symbols and world analysis but that if one treats the ‘other’ not as an other, not as something that is separate, someone who is interpreted by others or through an examination of social construction but as someone(s) who are constantly present, operating within the cracks of society but still part of society, then there is a re-imagining of entire histories.
Hermeneutical quote: “the central feature of philosophy is to work through or talk to a viable living one, which offers a coherence to the various ways by which we are dominated.” (127)
How does the analyzation of this philosophy allow for a constant relationship with deconstructionist thought and analysis? Understanding of constructions of others through a relationship with deconstruction to the analysisor.
“If Mudimbe is concerned with the everyday as the negotiable presence, it is a concern that is directly related to the textuality, the facticity of the everyday.” (127)
Beautiful statement. Again goes to the idea of hermeneutical thought. The everyday can be understood through a deconstruction of that which is taken for granted as a fact – the normalization of those processes of thought as well as the reading of text with an analytical lens.
“Any search for the new Africa will hardly succeed unless the essential cultural eclecticism is recognized and unless the absolute marginality of its intellectuals (most of how can only seriously live and work outside of their countries of origin) is taken as an operating fact . . . the turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated.” (129 - 130)
There is this idea that Pan-African thought can be lumped together into one category and that that category can be named by those that are not African.
“Fetish is itself a product of two different economic and cultural spaces . . . But what if the object itself becomes itself more than object, is renewable and discardable, is the bearer of stories but itself tells no stories, its surface consciously produced for the surface to laugh at us and join in our sadness.” (137)
Further clarification needed. Idea, perhaps, that African culture/identity and, by extension, Africans are that which are constantly being remade by those who seek to create an ‘other’ and how that identity is within a place of resistance and assimilation to dominant thought/structures/classifications of identity.
This idea if further discussed by the creation of Mami Wata.; this space, this creation of that which exists and has grown out of her but is not a part of her in some ways is a metaphor for the separate strands of African Intellectual thought. It exists within a relationship to deconstruction of that which is created as ‘other’, the social construction of what is authentically ‘African’ through the realization that all is socially constructed and exists separate from each other but within each other through the margins; through a reworking and recreating from a deconstructionist framework. “Mami Wata is the name (because she is the occasion) for African cultural theory.” (138) And, in an example of beauty within words, “she is the person who has to be made over constantly to discover who she is. She is floating signifier.” (138) There exists within this idea, the notion that while African Intellectual thought is deconstruction social constructions and while mass-media is primarily constructed within the confines of the ‘elite’s language’ that that which speaks to the masses, that which has been exported and commidified, is an identity that exists within the margins, a constant which is recreated; that which, like water, reflects back notions of itself as it has been defined by others but which at it’s depths is and is not that; it exists within the margins of dominance and has relationship with and against it. “This ‘shadow, not the substance’ . . . is not, after all, an obedient mimicry of the West. Rather it can operate as a map, a means of engagement with, and deconstruction of the West, while ambiguating hegemonic control over thought and action.” (138)
This isn’t all my thoughts. I decided to shorten it so as to not subject folk to the full spectrum of my thinking. Any thoughts?
lil ~ thank you so much for offering your thoughts. some of my confusion was around how religion plays into this. though i know (via Richards lectures) that Christianity infuses all dominant discourse, can we highlight the way religion is central to this article?
Can we highlight the way religion is central to this article?
The way that I see religion playing out in the article is around the idea that religion, specificially Christianity, can be viewed in a similiar context as language. It becomes another forum through which Africans learn and are in a deconstructive relationship with each other using a structure that was not originally theirs.
From the article, there is this idea that through a certain reading of the bible, one can "rediscover the black presence in the existing text. It operates in the inbetween space spaces to create a narrative continuity . . . We need to know our history so that we can know our future." (130) There has been a fetishization of African culture, thought, bodies. By reading texts, such as the bible, and stating that African presences have always been present within traditionally understood as 'white' history in a way that does not creating 'othering' but that deconstructs the idea that Black presences has been absent or are only within certain passages allows for there to be a living of African experiences within of spaces and histories.
Let me know if that helps or if it's completely off. Either one.
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