Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
Did Marx kill more persons than the British, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and German conquistadores and colonizers?
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
Did Marx kill more persons than the British, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and German conquistadores and colonizers?
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
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Did Marx kill more persons than the British, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and German conquistadores and colonizers?
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
This kind of attack on marx is typical of the red scare anti-communist movement from the 19th century on through the 20th. derrida distinguished between marx and Marxism, or what the various movements made of marx. To equate a figure like stalin with Marxist thought is abusive of history. Stalin is responsible for Stalinism. That he came on the heels of a Marxist revolution doesn’t mean that the totalitarian regime he engineering, the purges, the statism, the “revolution in one state,” in short the repressive regime, had anything to do with an ideology that conceived of the state “withering away” as the bourgeoisie was converted—not slaughtered—to a class with higher consciousness.
Every one of the reproaches of Marxism is built on this false connection of authoritarian abuse. It really strikes me as a playground level of thought, and it always amazed me that my students would parrot the conflation of Marxist thought and anticommunist propaganda.
There is really a core to this that needs to be reasserted. Marx built his political activism on the idea of mobilizing the working classes, and attempting to put the interests of the working class, the 99% we’d say in this country, above those of the 1% who ruled and imposed their ideology on the rest of society. A simple notion that is replicated again and again. a simple notion of a just society, deflected by pieces like this wall st. editorial.
I don’t think we should begin to accept it by acknowledging that the killings and dictatorships of regimes like cambodia’s or china’s embody the ideals or even ideas articulated by marx. The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx’s ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx’s thought.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 4 May 2018 at 15:41
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>, usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
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"The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx’s ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx’s thought." Harrow
Ken, since they are playing the numbers game we can certainly do that, too. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to take stock.
But in the end, I appreciate your point that Marx' ideals would run counter to such regimes. Marx was super optimistic about the withering away of the state. Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro consolidated
it beyond his wildest imagination. Whether or not they had a choice is open for debate.
Marx was not god. We don’t have to be fundamentalists, and pretend every thing he wrote, or predicted, was gospel. There are obviously parts of Marxist thought that are mostly discarded by people on the left who consider themselves partisan of the Marxist ideals, ideals of social justice without one class dominating another. That part is simple. The ideas of a relationship between base and superstructure, on one form or another, relative determinism and the like, have become incorporated into most theory taught nowadays. The great struggles over postcolonial thought are grounded from the outset in people who were inspired by Marxist thought, from cesaire to fanon to cabral on to Spivak and mbembe. Cineastes like sembene or hondo or gerrima.
I would have trouble finding a single theorist who doesn’t work in and around Marxism, though for many communism became a nightmare, largely because it was so oppressive, not because it was Marxist (thinking of zizek here, or even Mudimbe, in his first novel).
It has been a long time since I wanted to examine the parts of marxism that were inspiring vs those to be discarded. Most clearly vanguardism was a problem, as were notions of determinism. The very best guide, for me, became Raymond Williams, still, and following him the Birmingham school. Not any serious thinking in my years, starting late 50s, seriously took communism as a continuation of Marxism, because in the 1950s and 60s stalin destroyed that tie. All the intellectuals of the 60s who had been communists gradually left for some version of socialism, or more radically trotskeyism or Maoism, at least for a while. After hungary and then czechslovakia, the community party in Europe had splintered and pink communism in Italy or socialism in most places, replaced it. later the left split, as it is now, between liberals and socialists, more or less, with most of the global south following the socialist ideals, with a few dictators on the left or right exceptions.
What is the resurrection of the red scare on the right really about?
Could it not be, as it typically was, a cover for authoritarianism and populism? And that movement in the interest of the Koch brothers and their like? Isn’t that what gave us trump, along with all those east European dictators, the populist dictatorships in Nicaragua and the Philippines?
If I were to continue to enumerate autocracies, I’d have to be thinking about the great lakes rulers, including kagame, nkurunzima and kabila. But with this list, and the two above—nicaragua and phillippines, we start entering into a frame driven by globalized powers that have nothing to do with the older notions of industrial capitalism and communism. It is neoliberalism, with the vast enterprises driving with such force, that the state has become sidelined, reduced, irrelevant. At this point, the argument over Marxism has become merely historical. Think about one thing. China, the state most given to private enterprise, is still ruled by a so-called communist state. marx and mao, say, have absolutely nothing to do with that “communism.”
We have to return, with derrida, to the spectre of Marxism, its ideals to organize the 99% and struggle for their interests to be represented, without returning to useless arguments and without being duped into imagining something called capitalism or communism is what we are really fighting over.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
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Marx was not god. We don’t have to be fundamentalists, and pretend every thing he wrote, or predicted, was gospel. There are obviously parts of Marxist thought that are mostly discarded by people on the left who consider themselves partisan of the Marxist ideals, ideals of social justice without one class dominating another. That part is simple. The ideas of a relationship between base and superstructure, on one form or another, relative determinism and the like, have become incorporated into most theory taught nowadays. The great struggles over postcolonial thought are grounded from the outset in people who were inspired by Marxist thought, from cesaire to fanon to cabral on to Spivak and mbembe. Cineastes like sembene or hondo or gerrima.
I would have trouble finding a single theorist who doesn’t work in and around Marxism, though for many communism became a nightmare, largely because it was so oppressive, not because it was Marxist (thinking of zizek here, or even Mudimbe, in his first novel).
It has been a long time since I wanted to examine the parts of marxism that were inspiring vs those to be discarded. Most clearly vanguardism was a problem, as were notions of determinism. The very best guide, for me, became Raymond Williams, still, and following him the Birmingham school. Not any serious thinking in my years, starting late 50s, seriously took communism as a continuation of Marxism, because in the 1950s and 60s stalin destroyed that tie. All the intellectuals of the 60s who had been communists gradually left for some version of socialism, or more radically trotskeyism or Maoism, at least for a while. After hungary and then czechslovakia, the community party in Europe had splintered and pink communism in Italy or socialism in most places, replaced it. later the left split, as it is now, between liberals and socialists, more or less, with most of the global south following the socialist ideals, with a few dictators on the left or right exceptions.
What is the resurrection of the red scare on the right really about?
Could it not be, as it typically was, a cover for authoritarianism and populism? And that movement in the interest of the Koch brothers and their like? Isn’t that what gave us trump, along with all those east European dictators, the populist dictatorships in Nicaragua and the Philippines?
If I were to continue to enumerate autocracies, I’d have to be thinking about the great lakes rulers, including kagame, nkurunzima and kabila. But with this list, and the two above—nicaragua and phillippines, we start entering into a frame driven by globalized powers that have nothing to do with the older notions of industrial capitalism and communism. It is neoliberalism, with the vast enterprises driving with such force, that the state has become sidelined, reduced, irrelevant. At this point, the argument over Marxism has become merely historical. Think about one thing. China, the state most given to private enterprise, is still ruled by a so-called communist state. marx and mao, say, have absolutely nothing to do with that “communism.”
We have to return, with derrida, to the spectre of Marxism, its ideals to organize the 99% and struggle for their interests to be represented, without returning to useless arguments and without being duped into imagining something called capitalism or communism is what we are really fighting over.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 5 May 2018 at 10:29
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
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I don’t get your point. Marx and engels were indeed revolutionaries, but not with power. They died before the revolution in Russia, by many years. They did believe in violent revolution, to be sure. they imagined that revolution would be led by a vanguard, and supported by the people.
Maybe you should see the films of Eisenstein to imagine a Marxist view of the revolution in Russia, seen from the perspective of the masses.
Stalin led something else, really quite a sad and monstrous falling away from the origins. The guide, for me, into that world is Hannah arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 5 May 2018 at 17:17
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
You said Stalin destroyed the lie that Communism is a continuation of Marxism. But Marx and Engels in the Manifesto would disagree with you. They advocated a violent overthrow of the status quo. It happened in Russia. They maintained that overthrow with repression to guide against systemic failure.
O. Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 21:00 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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I have another reflection on this. the proletariat, the working class, described by marx and engels in the manifesto, was an oppressed class. The exploitation and conditions of work were monstrous. They were not only abused, but held in check by police and soldiers, not only in the u.k. but throughout Europe and the u.s.
The violence was something they were victims of.
And then the ruling classes accuse the very people whose labor they exploit of creating class warfare. Even today, that warped rightwing logic is used, and the more the propaganda is repeated, the more many people remain duped, and come to believe it is natural that this order of 1% owning everything is somehow the best.
On top of that, the anti-marxist rhetoric is turned up at a point when this neoliberal capitalist order is more pervasive than ever in history.
The irony here is really bitter.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
This kind of attack on marx is typical of the red scare anti-communist movement from the 19th century on through the 20th. derrida distinguished between marx and Marxism, or what the various movements made of marx. To equate a figure like stalin with Marxist thought is abusive of history. Stalin is responsible for Stalinism. That he came on the heels of a Marxist revolution doesn’t mean that the totalitarian regime he engineering, the purges, the statism, the “revolution in one state,” in short the repressive regime, had anything to do with an ideology that conceived of the state “withering away” as the bourgeoisie was converted—not slaughtered—to a class with higher consciousness.
Every one of the reproaches of Marxism is built on this false connection of authoritarian abuse. It really strikes me as a playground level of thought, and it always amazed me that my students would parrot the conflation of Marxist thought and anticommunist propaganda.
There is really a core to this that needs to be reasserted. Marx built his political activism on the idea of mobilizing the working classes, and attempting to put the interests of the working class, the 99% we’d say in this country, above those of the 1% who ruled and imposed their ideology on the rest of society. A simple notion that is replicated again and again. a simple notion of a just society, deflected by pieces like this wall st. editorial.
I don’t think we should begin to accept it by acknowledging that the killings and dictatorships of regimes like cambodia’s or china’s embody the ideals or even ideas articulated by marx. The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx’s ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx’s thought.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 4 May 2018 at 15:41
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>, usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
--
Some of the working class did not have access to his writings but hand outs and pamphlets were apparently made from time to time by union organizers etc. When the 1848 protest movements erupted around Europe in terms of strikes and barricades, his populist writing on Communism emerged.....the famous "Workers of the world unite......" So it seems that he and his supporters actually tried to reach ordinary workers.
On another note, Biko, do you know that Francis and Taylor are charging about 40 dollars for a
print-out of your article on Marx. If that is not exploitation and price gouging then nothing is.
Well Fidel once said that he was not a Marxist and so also Marx, it is claimed. When your theory
and ideas become unrecognizable in the hands of pundits and interpreters you may well have to make a disclaimer. It could be that Christ would probably say the same thing, namely, I am not a Christian. I doubt that he would support the pedophilia that emerged in one of the esteemed sects of the Christian church.
Targets is a funny word. He embraced the communist party as embodying the working class movement. He lived in relative poverty, making a slight living from writing for newspapers. His writings were political and economic philosophy. He wrote the most famous political tract in history, The Communist Manifesto, which was intended for the broad public.
The real question is, can one be a philosopher and also an activist, and my impression is that marx was both.
The question I have for those espousing anti-communist or anti-marxist views is, what is your real target. For some, totalitarianism is the same as communism; for others, the idea that a working class should live under the thumb of an educated ruling class, called in the past the bourgeoisie, seems normal. For the former point, all I can say is that marx was not stalin, and to take it further, stalin and the Russian communist party and its successors, destroyed the value in the workers movement that put the communists in power. When people became disillusioned with the rigidities of the communist party, they turned to socialism and created socialist parties. Most intellectuals of the 1950s, outside of asia and africa, took that path. By the 1970s, it was hard to find communist intellectuals, unless they were engaged in revolutions or wars, like Vietnam or guinea-bissau.
For the latter point, I would say that you might read some pikkety to get an idea of an economic who challenges the unequal distribution of wealth that marks our times.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 04:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
How many of the 99% of the working classes who were the target of Marx's activism had (and still has) access to Marx's writings? We're they really his targets?
Ayinka Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 14:20 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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Some of the working class did not have access to his writings but hand outs and pamphlets were apparently made from time to time by union organizers etc. When the 1848 protest movements erupted around Europe in terms of strikes and barricades, his populist writing on Communism emerged.....the famous "Workers of the world unite......" So it seems that he and his supporters actually tried to reach ordinary workers.
On another note, Biko, do you know that Francis and Taylor are charging about 40 dollars for a
print-out of your article on Marx. If that is not exploitation and price gouging then nothing is.
Well Fidel once said that he was not a Marxist and so also Marx, it is claimed. When your theory
and ideas become unrecognizable in the hands of pundits and interpreters you may well have to make a disclaimer. It could be that Christ would probably say the same thing, namely, I am not a Christian. I doubt that he would support the pedophilia that emerged in one of the esteemed sects of the Christian church.
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 9:17 AM, Kenneth Harrow<har...@msu.edu> wrote:
Marx was a young Hegelian, who set out to challenge idealism with dialectical materialism. To be perfectly honest, there is no profit in discussing whether marx was proletarian or bourgeois, or whether the u.s.s.r was socialist. That’s not “what we’re talking about.” That is, that’s not of interest to anybody. The question is whether marx’s reading of history and his philosophical emphasis on how materialism drives human ways of understand the world, were of importance.
If I were to provide a list of important thinkers who have been largely influenced by marx’s thought, it would stretch very very far.
If I were to provide a list of marx’s anti-communist critics, I doubt there would be a handful who are taken seriously.
Was his thought revised, over time, by thinkers on the left? Of course.
Lastly, to repeat, marx was not god. He wrote a lot; was brilliant and influential on generations of thinkers, not to mention activists. The attempts to discredit him are not new; they largely originate in public political writers, not in philosophers or serious political thinkers.
I say this because I seriously share many criticisms of Marxist thought, but I don’t believe that those old arguments are relevant today.
When you can produce a meaningful refutation of Raymond williams’s work on marx, then I’d be interested. I haven’t really come across that.
Maybe we are really talking at cross purposes. You are emphasizing the larger political changes, most of which I am lumping into the category analysed by arendt as totalitarian. I am emphasizing the ways Marxist thought influenced generations of major thinkers, including almost all the important postcolonial thinkers and writers of the period of the struggle for independence.
I offered a list of names before. Just consider cesaire and fanon, and tell me why I should listen to the rightwing commentators of today whose goals continue along the lines of those who oppressed Africa from the start.
Best
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 12:04
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Ken.
I'm an embodiment of the unequal distribution of wealth you speak of. I am fascinated by the practical manifestation of the workers creed and the philosophy behind it; the incongruence. To paraphrase it bluntly as WS put it In the 70s in the heyday of Marxist debates on campus:
1. is the university teacher a worker in the same way as a building site worker is?
2. Was Marx's activism realistic in that regard?
3. On his sick bed as the article showed Marx decided to shave his beard in order not to leave to posterity the prophetic look a gambit that did not succeed. Does this not indicate that those who see Marxism as the new religion are correct in that in spite of declarations to the contrary Marx and Freud deliberately constituted themselves as the High Priesthood of the new religion:science? We must remember they came to public consciousness in the scientific heyfays of the 19th century when new scientific disciplines came on stream.
I stand to be corrected but it seems USSR stands for socialist republic (and not communist republic)
In the case of Freud he was categorical on the question of method that the underguarding principle was the 'welthanchauung of science. My point is you dont go to the meticulous extent both went on the fortuitous gamble.
They set out to be the modern equivalent of Mohammed, Jesus and Moses with the third triumvir Einstein joining in the early years of the 20th century.(Jesus and Mohammed were not exactly rich at the commencement of their ministries too, hence their alleged benefactresses)
Freud lamented when the 15 th edition of The Interpretation of Dreams was published that it had not caught global attention as envisaged. They replaced self consciously the miracles of religion with the miracles of science the new zeitgeist. The whole universe was their playground and it is interesting how Marx was reported to be cooperating the archaeology of the universe to that of formation of social systems: a totalising mindset.
O.Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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Date: 07/05/2018 15:54 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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Marx was a young Hegelian, who set out to challenge idealism with dialectical materialism. To be perfectly honest, there is no profit in discussing whether marx was proletarian or bourgeois, or whether the u.s.s.r was socialist. That’s not “what we’re talking about.” That is, that’s not of interest to anybody. The question is whether marx’s reading of history and his philosophical emphasis on how materialism drives human ways of understand the world, were of importance.
If I were to provide a list of important thinkers who have been largely influenced by marx’s thought, it would stretch very very far.
If I were to provide a list of marx’s anti-communist critics, I doubt there would be a handful who are taken seriously.
Was his thought revised, over time, by thinkers on the left? Of course.
Lastly, to repeat, marx was not god. He wrote a lot; was brilliant and influential on generations of thinkers, not to mention activists. The attempts to discredit him are not new; they largely originate in public political writers, not in philosophers or serious political thinkers.
I say this because I seriously share many criticisms of Marxist thought, but I don’t believe that those old arguments are relevant today.
When you can produce a meaningful refutation of Raymond williams’s work on marx, then I’d be interested. I haven’t really come across that.
Maybe we are really talking at cross purposes. You are emphasizing the larger political changes, most of which I am lumping into the category analysed by arendt as totalitarian. I am emphasizing the ways Marxist thought influenced generations of major thinkers, including almost all the important postcolonial thinkers and writers of the period of the struggle for independence.
I offered a list of names before. Just consider cesaire and fanon, and tell me why I should listen to the rightwing commentators of today whose goals continue along the lines of those who oppressed Africa from the start.
Best
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From:
usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 12:04
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Ken.
I'm an embodiment of the unequal distribution of wealth you speak of. I am fascinated by the practical manifestation of the workers creed and the philosophy behind it; the incongruence. To paraphrase it bluntly as WS put it In the 70s in the heyday of Marxist debates on campus:
1. is the university teacher a worker in the same way as a building site worker is?
2. Was Marx's activism realistic in that regard?
3. On his sick bed as the article showed Marx decided to shave his beard in order not to leave to posterity the prophetic look a gambit that did not succeed. Does this not indicate that those who see Marxism as the new religion are correct in that in spite of declarations to the contrary Marx and Freud deliberately constituted themselves as the High Priesthood of the new religion:science? We must remember they came to public consciousness in the scientific heyfays of the 19th century when new scientific disciplines came on stream.
I stand to be corrected but it seems USSR stands for socialist republic (and not communist republic)
In the case of Freud he was categorical on the question of method that the underguarding principle was the 'welthanchauung of science. My point is you dont go to the meticulous extent both went on the fortuitous gamble.
They set out to be the modern equivalent of Mohammed, Jesus and Moses with the third triumvir Einstein joining in the early years of the 20th century.(Jesus and Mohammed were not exactly rich at the commencement of their ministries too, hence their alleged benefactresses)
Freud lamented when the 15 th edition of The Interpretation of Dreams was published that it had not caught global attention as envisaged. They replaced self consciously the miracles of religion with the miracles of science the new zeitgeist. The whole universe was their playground and it is interesting how Marx was reported to be cooperating the archaeology of the universe to that of formation of social systems: a totalising mindset.
O.Agbetuyi
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Date: 07/05/2018 15:54 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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I loved your story about barkeley. Reminds me of one of the funniest moments in all cinema, Jacques tati, in Playtime, where the door to a hotel, rushing to open, is broken, the glass shattered. The doorman proceeds to open the door to people coming in by “opening” with the doorknob. It is the funniest thing you’ve seen.
As for marx reinventing the wheel, we all build on discourses that come before us. But some people contribute more than others to that grand river of thought that gets shared with others.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 14:12
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
I have no quarrels with the influence of Marx on subsequent thinkers include postcolonial discourses and that in part was why I brought up the campus debates in my time.
Like you said we should as intellectuals also from time to time look at how their ideas fit in with other ideas from antiquity rather than see them as suddenly discovered 'gospel truth" I have taught Marx's for many years as the embodiment of the thesis/ antithesis schema between his ideas and Hegelian unseen spirit of History. They are both appropriations reinventions and re-applications of the classical philosophical positions of materialism vs immaterialism.
My favourite anecdote was of the immaterialist philosopher Berkeley who was goaded to walk through a door by his friend when he knocked because the door was not physically there.
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Date: 07/05/2018 18:20 (GMT+00:00)
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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The context of the quote is circa 1880 when Marx assisted French intellectuals in writing the program for the Parti Ouvrier de France (worker's party of France). The Parti Ouvrier wanted a program and Marx helped Jules Guesde write said program...............................
.....................................................................................................
Thanks for the comment.Well I wondered about the context of the statement. It seems that it was about Marx' displeasure with some perks given to workers. He felt that such goodies would undermine their determination to change the system.
It was all about the interpretation and implementation . This raises some exciting questions about the theory itself.
GE
“left wing communists” seems a strange descriptor to me.
I would contrast the movements called Maoism, say, or troskyite communists from Stalinists or western Europeans, in the 1960s. in fact, without designating the period, we have nothing to compare.
Marx was generally hostile toward the lumpenproletariat, and represented himself as an advocate for the proletariat.
I think the ones being critiqued here might qualify vaguely as lumpenproletariat.
But that was for another century, another economic order.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 8 May 2018 at 20:18
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
<emea...@ccsu.edu> wrote:
The context of the quote is circa 1880 when Marx assisted French intellectuals in writing the program for the Parti Ouvrier de France (worker's party of France). The Parti Ouvrier wanted a program and Marx helped Jules Guesde write said program...............................
.....................................................................................................
Thanks for the comment.Well I wondered about the context of the statement. It seems that it was about Marx' displeasure with some perks given to workers. He felt that such goodies would undermine their determination to change the system.
It was all about the interpretation and implementation . This raises some exciting questions about the theory itself.
GE
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 12:17 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you GE about your observations on Christ. I almost included that in my earlier postings. I have often wondered if there is indeed a second coming Christ would be able to reconcile himself to all the edifice erected in his name. Quite a modest man belonging to a Spartan brotherhood. However we need to take Marxs denials with the pinch of salt. Why go to all that length to systematise your thinking then recording and preserving correspondence letters if you dont wsnt to be associated with marxism when the point is that you ARE Marxism .
The workers demonstrations showed that they succeeded in awakening a generation of 'disciples" to which their writings were directed and who would be the nucleus of the vanguard they wrote about.
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From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Date: 07/05/2018 15:55 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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Some of the working class did not have access to his writings but hand outs and pamphlets were apparently made from time to time by union organizers etc. When the 1848 protest movements erupted around Europe in terms of strikes and barricades, his populist writing on Communism emerged.....the famous "Workers of the world unite......" So it seems that he and his supporters actually tried to reach ordinary workers.
On another note, Biko, do you know that Francis and Taylor are charging about 40 dollars for a
print-out of your article on Marx. If that is not exploitation and price gouging then nothing is.
Well Fidel once said that he was not a Marxist and so also Marx, it is claimed. When your theory
and ideas become unrecognizable in the hands of pundits and interpreters you may well have to make a disclaimer. It could be that Christ would probably say the same thing, namely, I am not a Christian. I doubt that he would support the pedophilia that emerged in one of the esteemed sects of the Christian church.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
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Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 4:11 AM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
How many of the 99% of the working classes who were the target of Marx's activism had (and still has) access to Marx's writings? We're they really his targets?
Ayinka Agbetuyi
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From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 14:20 (GMT+00:00)
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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OK but he felt that peasants were potentially counter-revolutionary
given their property holdings in livestock and farm land.
True?
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On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 9:39 PM, Kenneth Harrow<har...@msu.edu> wrote:
Despite engel’s aid, marx lived in relative poverty. Thanks to engel’s aid, marx was able to live.
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Wednesday 9 May 2018 at 14:29
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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Date: 09/05/2018 16:47 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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Special thanks to the contributions of Tomi Adeaga and Asonzeh Ukah.
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Despite engel’s aid, marx lived in relative poverty. Thanks to engel’s aid, marx was able to live.
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Wednesday 9 May 2018 at 14:29
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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Date: 09/05/2018 16:47 (GMT+00:00)
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On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 4:28 PM, Windows Live 2018<yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Let’s move on to the larger point being debated.
If I write about social issues, inequalities, do my writings have to be comprehensible to the masses of the people about whom I write for them to be valid? Do I have to live in their conditions to understand them, and to have validity conferred on my points?
I do not believe in the old-fashioned notions of conscientization, which means something like political awareness. I think people are aware; they just choose rightwing or leftwing views. I don’t think it requires direct experience of a phenomenon for me to understand it. if that were the case, we would understand only ourselves, or our group.
I do believe that perspective is different from knowledge, and that to have the perspective or another requires some kind of close familiarity. I am telling you this because I am not too worried about contradicting myself.
The last time I stayed in Africa for a spell—about a year—I arrived with fairly strong notions about outside pressures placed on the continent, imf and world bank, and agency being compromised. I had notions about the issues. Well, if you read about what’s happening in a place, you form ideas. But the focus of my ideas changed as time went by; my perspective changed radically, I saw things in terms of the issues that presented themselves to me on the street, as I walked in the morning to get my newspapers and bread, as the talibe children came up; as I read about the pirogues I passed jogging daily, about the things that the dakarois concerned themselves with and expressed in the press or conversations, etc.
I located myself in a different range of concerns. My views changed.
I don’t think marx, as a philosopher, as the great thinker who wrote about historical materialism, needed to prove his bona fides, or that engels’s money made a whit of difference in the value of his philosophical writings, any more than gramsci’s analyses became more valid because he was in prison, or that trotsky’s exile made his revolutionary thought more correct. The translation from the material to the ideational is never direct; it is mediated by our own thought, which can be shaped by our experiences.
But to imagine that experience “determines” thought is to be naïve. Trump supporters come from all walks in life, and each has his or her own reason for making racist, populist, stupid choices, just like the rest of us.
I am trying to shun easy determinisms, or identity politics, as explanations for our thinking or agency. At the same time, I agree with materialist, relative materialist, reasoning. Like Raymond Williams. He convinces me, along with stuart hall when he writes that we can’t change the history that we experience, but we can create our own stories about that history, and it is in the combination of those two things, only, that we can talk about something like identity.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Friday 11 May 2018 at 00:07
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
If you say so...
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Date: 09/05/2018 23:36 (GMT+00:00)
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Let’s move on to the larger point being debated.
If I write about social issues, inequalities, do my writings have to be comprehensible to the masses of the people about whom I write for them to be valid? Do I have to live in their conditions to understand them, and to have validity conferred on my points?
I do not believe in the old-fashioned notions of conscientization, which means something like political awareness. I think people are aware; they just choose rightwing or leftwing views. I don’t think it requires direct experience of a phenomenon for me to understand it. if that were the case, we would understand only ourselves, or our group.
I do believe that perspective is different from knowledge, and that to have the perspective or another requires some kind of close familiarity. I am telling you this because I am not too worried about contradicting myself.
The last time I stayed in Africa for a spell—about a year—I arrived with fairly strong notions about outside pressures placed on the continent, imf and world bank, and agency being compromised. I had notions about the issues. Well, if you read about what’s happening in a place, you form ideas. But the focus of my ideas changed as time went by; my perspective changed radically, I saw things in terms of the issues that presented themselves to me on the street, as I walked in the morning to get my newspapers and bread, as the talibe children came up; as I read about the pirogues I passed jogging daily, about the things that the dakarois concerned themselves with and expressed in the press or conversations, etc.
I located myself in a different range of concerns. My views changed.
I don’t think marx, as a philosopher, as the great thinker who wrote about historical materialism, needed to prove his bona fides, or that engels’s money made a whit of difference in the value of his philosophical writings, any more than gramsci’s analyses became more valid because he was in prison, or that trotsky’s exile made his revolutionary thought more correct. The translation from the material to the ideational is never direct; it is mediated by our own thought, which can be shaped by our experiences.
But to imagine that experience “determines” thought is to be naïve. Trump supporters come from all walks in life, and each has his or her own reason for making racist, populist, stupid choices, just like the rest of us.
I am trying to shun easy determinisms, or identity politics, as explanations for our thinking or agency. At the same time, I agree with materialist, relative materialist, reasoning. Like Raymond Williams. He convinces me, along with stuart hall when he writes that we can’t change the history that we experience, but we can create our own stories about that history, and it is in the combination of those two things, only, that we can talk about something like identity.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Friday 11 May 2018 at 00:07
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
If you say so...
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Date: 09/05/2018 23:36 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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I should have added a “d” to “experience.” Sorry.
Meant to say that stuart hall said, we can’t change the history that we experienced.
He says that we are something like between, or a combo of, being and becoming. Being in that we share a common history (we, in his case, referred to people of African descent, but it is true for all groups of people who share a history); but becoming in that we make of that history what we will, i.e, we recount it, we narrate it, in our own fashion, and in the process fashion ourselves. He is clearly avoiding essentializing with “becoming,” but affirming a base, if not an original, for a community, a community identity. the same move made by Gilmore in Black Atlantic.
By the way, the poem you are reaching for must be blake’s, right?
Marx surely anticipated blood from revolution. He lived through two in his life, 1848 and 1870, the great paris commune. That’s hardly the same as the gulag and Stalinist blood. Hardly the same spirit, the same intent.
Stalin used slave labor, like all those damned totalitarian and dictatorial states of the 20th century, in order to industrialize.
Resistance in the paris commune was in the name of the people; Stalinist repression was in the name of the state, and against the people’s lives and freedoms.
I guess I am practicing stuart hall’s words: I write one history of the communist movement, of Marxism, and you another. We choose where to place our ideals.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
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Date: Monday 14 May 2018 at 11:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx would disagree with Raymond Williams that we can't change the history that we experience. That is what Marxism is all about: how we can change the history that we experience. That was why Lenin spent decades pursuing the goal of the Russian Revolution ( going into exile and back)until it was secured. That was why Nigetians never despaired until they chased the soldiers back to the barracks with their votes.
When I was teaching the Russian Revolution I came across the statement that socialism was the inevitable part and parcel and outgrowth of western capitalism. Trade unions could not but attend the Industrial Revolution in Britain where conditions were bleak for labour and children as early as 11 had to be factory hands for pittance with faces covered in soot ( I believe subject of one of Coleridges poems. Of course Marx and the intelligentsia saw all of this and voted to fight for an end to these in a systematized way. This was why Marx was quoted as saying we have to think for them ( the lower classes) But problem is how many of 'them wanted a level playing ground of a classless society and not a reversal of roles where they would join the oppressor class.? No matter what we might say of Stalin, Lenin (the intellectua- it was a matter of background and outlook in the endl) tried as hard as possible to keep faith with Marx's intellectual legacy.
Again problem is Lenin endorsed the Bolsheviks gory tactics of the murder of the Czars family which led to the civil war between the Whites and the Reds (I actually supervised a graduation thesis of the various divisions within the contending factions of consolidation ideologies post Bolshevik takeover a couple of years ago). There were problems with which was the best method forward and the intellectual class joined the fray with blood on the carpet. So applying Marx's template was not a straight forward affair even with the best of intentions. Yes, it led to collosal loss of lives across the globe, which was where this thread started from.
To argue that Marx one way or the other did not envisage this would happen is not conceivable. That he did not envisage that the clarion call for workers of the world should RISE UP and unite against their masters if heeded would lead to resistance from the capitalist would suggest that Marx was not actually Marx and that his Einsteinian E=mc2 equivalent which is the thesis vs antithesis= synthesis was never penned by him. Surely the implications of his equation meant conflict (including physical conflict and military takeover.) His vanguard in Russia had no qualms about that and mobilised the proletariat in that direction. They created stories of mobilisation that changed history.
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Date: 11/05/2018 14:23 (GMT+00:00)
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.

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Ken, many thanks -- as always -- for reminding Dialogue contributors (and readers) of Stuart Hall, with his quote about history. Back in the UK, it
was a real treat to know him through Kaye Whiteman, Editor of the erstwhile London-based West Africa Magazine, his fellow Oxon (of Merton
College, Oxford). He has been dead since 2014 (at age 82, according to The Guardian obituary of 10th February 2014), but he "came back alive"
through his posthumously-published brilliant memoir/autobiography, Familiar Stranger. I recommend it to anyone, who wants to continue to enjoy
Stuart's witty intellect as well as his sharp expertise in race theory.
I am sure that Stuart, these days, is holding court "Upstairs" with Professors Mazrui, Irele, Achebe, and Adu-Boahen, among others. Whenever
I leave our wretched earth (now complicated by Trumpism), it should be gratifying to meet our "familiar stranger" to ask him a refreshing point in
his published memoir, in which he unabashedly wrote that he and his new English bride (Catherine) "had a lot of sex" on a ship going to the
Caribbean! Of course, passing away at 82, Stuart did deserve his final say about anything in his memoir. So, may he rest in perfect peace!!
A.B. Assensoh.
Thanks akwasi for this altogether pleasant response. Add to it an absolutely wonderful film about stuart hall by john akomfrah: The Stuart Hall Project. I highly recommend it.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Wonderful and many thanks (Ese pupo in Yoruba)! Brother Akomfrah's film is needed to add to our Stuart Hall keepsakes!
Ken, you're a treasure and a walking encyclopedia! No doubt, you're, deservingly, joining the exclusive club (in the words of Professor Ali A. Mazrui) of Emeritus Professors.
A.B,. Assensoh.
Thanks a.b. the only thing I feel somewhat knowledgeable about is African film. And to an extent African lit.
The rest is dabbling; but for a fun list of friends like this, I am less afraid of venturing opinions on lots.
I do know john akomfrah and his work, and I place it at the top of the world. Everything he does is marvellous. Recently, I worked on his Nine Muses. What a brilliant tour de force, and the most amazing of films on the theme of the migrant. He focuses, as you'd think, on that windrush generation, but draws upon a cornucopia of western classics to reinforce the notion that the migrant, the diaspora, have been with us from the beginning. He reaches across to homer’s odyssey, and uses a fair number of irish authors as well. But the heart of it is the windrush generation; and now, these few years since that film was made, we read about the monstrosities of May and the british conservatives putting those poor people’s rights to be in England in doubt. May apologized, a day late, a dollar short. After the damage was done.
Racism and the 21st century, still there alas