Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

[Olusegun Olopade]

Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

 

Howdy?

Check this newly published article from Toyin Falola.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND CULTURAL LIMITATIONS

https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/12/13/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations-by-toyin-falola/

https://www.chronicle.gm/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations-a-reflection-on-2020-human-rights-day/

https://www.naijatimes.ng/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations/

Cheers!

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Olusegun Olopade
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Toyin Falola Network
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[Biko Agozino]

'To begin with, I clarified the concept of culture. It is a way of life that lays the groundwork and provides the frame of reference with which people approach and navigate their everyday lives and experiences.' - Toyin Falola

To say that culture is a way of life is to replicate the contested consensual definition advanced by colonial functionalist anthropologists. To say that it is a way of life is to suggest that the way people live is their chosen consensus way of life. Quite on the contrary, the way Africans live in a racist world, the way women live in patriarchal societies, and the way the colonized and the poor live in a world under imperialist domination cannot be said to be their ways of life. Rather, these are conditions imposed by law against which they struggle for liberation. Therefore, culture is the way of struggles for and against domination according to Du Bois, CLR James, Azikiwe, Nkrumah,  Fanon, Cabral, Rodney, Mandela, Ousmane, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Amadiume, Nzegwu, Oyewumi, Bessie Head, Ruth First, Derrida, Gilroy, and Stuart Hall.

Biko

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[Dr BioDun J Ogundayo]

Let the polemics, criticology, ergotation, and definitional fireworks begin o. Me, I dey siddon look ni shaa. Teach me, teach us, wise ones.

BioDun

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Biko:

I dont think either of you are wrong. Culture is one of those words that necessarily demonstrates leaning.  TF has decided expressly not to deploy the left leaning definition of culture to which you refer.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Date: 13/12/2020 17:19 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Rights and CulturalLimitations,  By Toyin Falola

'To begin with, I clarified the concept of culture. It is a way of life that lays the groundwork and provides the frame of reference with which people approach and navigate their everyday lives and experiences.' - Toyin Falola

To say that culture is a way of life is to replicate the contested consensual definition advanced by colonial functionalist anthropologists. To say that it is a way of life is to suggest that the way people live is their chosen consensus way of life. Quite on the contrary, the way Africans live in a racist world, the way women live in patriarchal societies, and the way the colonized and the poor live in a world under imperialist domination cannot be said to be their ways of life. Rather, these are conditions imposed by law against which they struggle for liberation. Therefore, culture is the way of struggles for and against domination according to Du Bois, CLR James, Azikiwe, Nkrumah,  Fanon, Cabral, Rodney, Mandela, Ousmane, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Amadiume, Nzegwu, Oyewumi, Bessie Head, Ruth First, Derrida, Gilroy, and Stuart Hall.

Biko

On Sunday, 13 December 2020, 11:20:01 GMT-5, Olusegun Olopade <bcma...@toyinfalolanetwork.org> wrote:

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[Dr BioDun J Ogundayo]

Biko my brother, your citing or referencing Mandela et al's notions/theories of culture already has its limitations since these are mostly leftist, anticolonialist... Thus a very ideological definition from your side, of culture. Your iteration if culture thus comes with limitations, as valid it is. The social engineer that I perceive you to be, reminds me of Marx's political economy as a tool for reimagining society/culture...

Falola's definition seems, (and I am being presumptuous here, since I cannot read his mind) rooted in the recently departed Olabiyi Yai's semiotics of culture, this, located in the etymology of Yoruba àsà (culture), thus a broader definition that,  a priori, acknowledges that our people,  indeed all peoples, do have agency in shaping their social and lived reality, be they subjugated, or not. 

Falola's definition, or notions, of culture, will include indigenous technologies such as farming practices, manufacture and use of tools, religion,etc that predate and have even outlasted the worst forms of European and white supremacist hegemony. 

Just sayin'...

BioDun

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i don't see why "culture" is the right term for dissensus, a la ranciere. i agree with biko's list of liberationist activist thinkers; i agree that the dominant trends in the social order reinforce the order that favors those who sustain the dominant. but the resistance is intrinsic to the force used to impose dominance, as foucault put it.

there is no real culture on either side of this political divide, in my opinion. culture is tied to these conflicting values, arising in relation to th e economic base as raymond williams describes the superstructure. but i don't see that arising so automatically as a conscious open form of resistance.

i like to ask the same question as does gramsci,how come the working class turned from the communist party to the fascist in italy. and in fact all across economic stricken europe in the 1920s and 30s.

how did reagan gain the reagan democratics; how did trump do the same w the working class? race is only one factor in this. the populism cannot be severed from the country singers and rightwing actors and sports enthusiasts who flocked to the rightwing populist. certainly culture is divided between new york's operahouse and the opryhouse in tennessee.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 1:28 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Rights and CulturalLimitations, By Toyin Falola

 

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[Biko Agozino]

Oga BJ, 

I think that Falola is up to his usual Esu Elegba tricks. The context of his lecture is a Free State in South Africa that is anything but free, a location of bitter struggles over culture that employs what they call 'cultural weapons' down there. Falola was referring to this indirectly when he said: 'Culture is also, in its banal conception, known as the way of life of a people.' Racism, sexism, and poverty are not ways of life, they are part of the material conditions under which people make history through the struggle.

Ken is closer to the politics of Cultural Studies by invoking Raymond Williams on working class culture. How come the conservative party is successful at mobilizing working class votes to dominate UK politics and how come the Labour Party in office was rarely the party for decolonization or against war?

Stuart Hall answered that question by calling on the left to admit failure in the struggle for hegemony by offering no clear leftwing populism to counter the authoritarian populism of Tatcherism with emphasis on anti-immigration, anti organized labor, and anti women's rights as human rights. Hall invoked Gramsci and Althusser to suggest that Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser) have a role to play in the struggle; and that it is not only the working class that exercise hegemony by offering intellectual and moral leadership (Gramsci) to other exploited classes such as the peasantry; the ruling class is also engaged in the struggle for hegemony by redefining its interest as the national interest to win the consent of the poor who sign up to kill and die for the national flag in the interest of capitalists fighting for the lion's share of colonies in Africa during both world wars, as Du Bois pointed out in both world wars.

The definition of culture as a struggle is not a left-wing definition just as the definition of a car as an automobile is not a right-wing definition. It is an operational definition that is applied to the culture of the dominant and that of the subaltern alike. Edward Said clarified this in Culture and Imperialism. Cabral theorized it in A Return to the Source. And the NAZI agreed by confessing that whenever they heard the word culture, they grabbed their pistols.

What you are crediting to Professor Yai, from the little I gathered through the tribute shared by Professor Oyewumi, is that 'asa' means the tradition which is different from culture. The active cultural struggle goes on all the time as groups contest what is being imposed by force and by consent or struggle to counter the hegemonic culture and build a more humane future. That is why it was reported that Agostino Neto greeted Fela with 'La Luta Continua!' And Fela responded, 'Why? When will the struggle end so that we can enjoy small small?'

Biko

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

biko gave a good summary of what i intended by evoking black cultural studies, with hall. and of course that whole world of gramsci and althusser.

what about since then, in thinking how a political coalition might be forged? for a long time the successors to the founders of cultural studies who appealed to me were chantal mouffe and laclau. after them, i found neoliberal globalization changed the parameters of the political, and i follow the lead of the comaroffs and mbembe as representing where we are nowadays.

anyway, the old school of liberationist, marxist thought is materialist, and that implies enormous changes as the "base" or structures of relations and life, along w culture, have changed. the spirit of this movement, as derrida expressed beautifully in Spectres of Marx, remain dominant for me. i also drew inspiration from ranciere, whose notions of similar patterns of domination and resistance are inspirational.

going back to said etc., as biko evoked, remains the force and basis for inspired political work; but the times done changed and we have to learn to fly without perching too

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 5:04 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

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[Femi Kolapo]

A consideration of the socio-psychological dimension to culture and a focus on the individual and away from the meta political structures of class and superordination and subordination also seem to remain ever useful. A child of five whose thoughts and actions are yet to be consciously affected by politics bears culture that is specific to the child’s locale of socialization relative to another local within the same geopolitical boundary and within the same structure of national inter-class relations.  

Culture as a deep level, a times subliminal, framework or model or what anthropologists/sociologists? term frames or narratives that we use to interpret our experiences and to respond to members of our locale in particular ways and to members of other locales in different ways still has a validity that repeated experiences of migrants, expatriates, and exiles continue to demonstrate. The profoundly different ways that people from different locales (even from the same country) relate to noise, to death, strangers, time, new stimuli, to pain and sorrow, blood, blood flow etc., all validate the continuing relevance of the “banal” view of culture. Some dimensions of culture cut across class. 

/F. Kolapo

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dr BioDun J Ogundayo <akand...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 2:15 PM
To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

 

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[Biko Agozino]

I agree with Ken about the need to identify and groom the next generation of Cultural Studies specialists who are also scholar-activists the way that Hall exemplified. It is not enough to critique crude economism, it is a mistake to assume that the economy is no longer important in cultural studies. The roe of DJ Switch and other Afrobeat stars in the #EndSARS movement shows that post-colonial theorists who obsess about the critique of Marx are mistaken:

"What has resulted from (postcolonial theory's) abandonment of this deterministic economism has been, not alternative ways of thinking questions about the economic relations and their effects, but instead a massive, gigantic and eloquent disavowal."-Stuart Hall. The mistake of Hall was that he had only two paradigms of Cultural Studies - The French and the British. He should have articulated in addition the Black or African Paradigm (from which his own theory was derived) that privileges critical, centered, and creative scholar-activism.

Fortunately, the Journal of African Cultural Studies is supporting scholarship and activism that tries to carve this niche: List of issues Journal of African Cultural Studies

List of issues Journal of African Cultural Studies Browse the list of issues and latest articles from Journal of African Cultural Studies

Biko

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