Re: Important Reminder---Applications for Appointed Board of Education/ Do it!..

35 views
Skip to first unread message

MsJo...@aol.com

unread,
May 10, 2013, 5:26:56 PM5/10/13
to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com, lesa...@yahoogroups.com, dcl...@yahoogroups.com, Camne...@yahoogroups.com, kenya...@yahoogroups.com, nigerianw...@yahoogroups.com, mwana...@yahoogroups.com, AC...@yahoogroups.com, Africans_Wit...@yahoogroups.com
Hello Continental Africans:
 
Why does it cost? If you can, go to the post office by mid-night - Union Station. A new council member of the City of Hyattsville, Md just won. He is from Guinea. His opponent was from Ethiopia. Either way, a Continental African would have been voted. Mr. Haba won by 96 votes and Mr. Geretse by 12 votes.
 
Get engaged. That's the only way to influence things in America. Do you know that almost all the high level Hispanic or Asian appointees have roots in Hispanic or Asian organizations? Check Tom Perez - US Secretary of Labor who replaced another Hispanic. He is from Casa de Maryland, the grassroots group. Check Supreme Justice Sotomayor - National Council of La Raza; the first Asian Labor Secretary Elaine Chao - Coordinator of Asians for George Bush....
'
 
 
In a message dated 5/10/2013 4:51:24 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, countye...@co.pg.md.us writes:
Prince George's County Office of Community Relations

Friends,

Today, Friday, May 10 is the last day for residents who are interested in serving as an appointee to the Prince George's County Board of Education to submit an application.    Recently, Governor O'Malley signed into law the Maryland House of Delegates Bill 1107 (HB 1107), which enables the County Executive to select the next Superintendent/Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the public school system as well as the authority to appoint three new members to the Board of Education. 

 

Residents who are interested in serving as appointed members of the Prince George's County Board of Education may submit an application.  The appointees, who must be County residents, will serve four-year terms.  Applications are available here on the County's website, in public libraries and at the County Administration Building upon request.  Applications should be emailed to educati...@co.pg.md.us or mailed/delivered to the Office of the County Executive, County Administration Building, 14741 Governor Oden Bowie Drive, Upper Marlboro, Maryland 20772-3050.  All applications must be postmarked or date stamped by Friday, May 10, 2013. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

 

I hope that you will continue to be actively engaged in the future of public education in Prince George's County. Please feel free to write us at countye...@co.pg.md.us or call 3-1-1 anytime with any questions, concerns, or ideas regarding school governance or any other issues you may have.  

 

Sincerely,

 

Rushern L. Baker, III

County Executive   

http://visitor.constantcontact.com/do?p=un&mse=001TqkDdJpTfnrTEyhAKiaY8dq4ZxnmRwiO&t=001aYwkQ6zWEuqN6HPcajgH8Q==&llr=zuamvrcab http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp?cc=TEM_Basic_204
This email was sent to msjo...@aol.com by countye...@co.pg.md.us |  
Prince George's County Office of Community Relations | 14741 Governor Oden Bowie Dr | County Administration Building | Upper Marlboro | MD | 20772

Chika Onyeani

unread,
May 10, 2013, 5:55:40 PM5/10/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com

"Plundering of Africa Through Secret Mining Deals," Kofi Annan


"We (Africans) are not getting the revenues we deserve often because of either corrupt practices, transfer pricing, tax evasion and all sorts of activities that deprive us of our due," Mr Annan said.(READ MORE)
 
Recent Articles

Chika A. Onyeani
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
African Sun Times: www.africansuntimes.com
Host: All Africa Radio: www.allafricaradio.com
Tel.: 973-675-9919
Fax: 973-675-5704
Cell: 917-279-4038

Biko Agozino

unread,
May 10, 2013, 11:59:16 PM5/10/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:


http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in-garbage-out.html


Ikhide

unread,
May 11, 2013, 9:08:22 AM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back -  like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.

And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
 
- Ikhide
 
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide



From: Biko Agozino <biko...@yahoo.com>
To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 


Akurang-Parry, Kwabena

unread,
May 11, 2013, 11:19:37 AM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:

 

My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.

 

Kwabena

 

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Ikhide [xok...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse

Chidi Anthony Opara

unread,
May 11, 2013, 11:47:13 AM5/11/13
to USA Africa Dialogue Series
“-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
one take to write a review-------?---------“
-----Kwabena.

The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
Literature.

CAO.



On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" <KAP...@ship.edu> wrote:
> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>
> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>
> Kwabena
>
> ________________________________
> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>
> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back -  like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>
> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>
> - Ikhide
>
> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://www.xokigbo.com/>
> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide<http://www.facebook.com/ikhide>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Biko Agozino <bikoz...@yahoo.com>
> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>
> Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>
> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>
> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>
> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
>
> Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
>
> http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in...
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

unread,
May 11, 2013, 12:02:51 PM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com




On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:02 AM, Valentine Ojo <elew...@gmail.com<mailto:elew...@gmail.com>> wrote:
It is interesting that the African 'fans' of Ken Harrow are now just beginning to see
him for what he is - a cleverly-disguised white racist who enjoys playing 'massa'
among his Black minions!

What took you all so long to catch on...?

<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/>

THIS WEB LOG IS DEVOTED TO SIMPLE BUT DEEP READINGS OF THE SUBTLE AND NOT SO SUBTLE MESSAGES AND TO THE INTERPRETATION OF THE SILENCES THAT ARE STRATEGICALLY DELIVERED THROUGH THE MASS MEDIA. OTHER READERS ARE WELCOME TO AGREE OR DISAGREE OR EVEN OFFER NEW READINGS OF OTHER RELEVANT TEXTS FOR THE PROMOTION OF MASS LITERACY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING.

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013
Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

The author reports in the introduction that he was warned about this choice of words in his earlier book onPostcolonial Cinema in Africa. According to him, Jude Akudinobi warned him against taking the analogy too far especially given that the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: ‘If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African’, he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans that is all too familiar from the point of view of white supremacy, a perspective that is contradictory to his otherwise pro-African views in his scholarship.

One of the reasons given by Ken Harrow for using the trope of trash to represent valuable African cultural productions is because he finds support in the theory of Bataille about the locations of trash (Chapter 1). Here he said that he threw a challenge in his earlier book,Postcolonial Cinema, calling for a new Aristotle to emerge to theorize the new cinema of Africa. Without telling us why he presumes that another Aristotle, a guy who believed that slavery was natural, would be a suitable theoretical framework for understanding African culture, a culture that was wounded by centuries of slavery, Bro Ken decided to take up his own challenge.

Trash therefore appears to be a pitiable wrestling match between him and himself. His difficulty could have been enormously lessened if he had ignored Aristotle and examined the drama of classical African civilization in ancient Egypt that predated Greek drama by 3000 years, according to Cheikh Anta Diop (Civilization or Barbarism). The presumption of race-class-gender superiorism by Harrow is revealed when he cites Battaille as asserting that the upper classes make ‘almost exclusive use of ideas’ even when some of those ideas may have lowly origins (p.15). The Ken Harrow who writes everything in lower case letters in his constant online contributions to debates would have been expected to challenge Bataille here but he accepts the dubious notion uncritically just as he accepted Mbembe’s astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.

His only attempt to critique this myopic view about Africans came out lame because of his coupling of ‘glamorousness/repulsiveness’ (p.24) as if they are conjoined twins in African cinema. On the same page he demeans Ghana by suggesting that a ‘shit-caked handrail’ in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (where the handrail in question was not covered in shit cakes but in a ‘generous grub of mucous’, a wise hygienic advice to avoid germ-infested public handrails that is heard even in ‘clean’ countries) was representative of Ghana under Nkrumah. But CLR James would differ in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution by identifying the glorious National School Movement as a major medium of resistance to colonialism and a major achievement in nation-building, not shit cakes or trash.

Harrow cites Sembene Ousmane as identifying African cinema as the night school of the masses in line with Achebe’s subservience of literature to pedagogy but he devalues such emphases in African arts and cinema by following Ranciere to term them ‘mimesis’ of mere ‘representation’ as opposed to experimentation (32-33).

In arguing his spurious hypothesis that revolutionary accounts tend to neglect trash, Harrow makes a grievous theoretical error by asserting that ‘views from the trash landscape…don’t figure in the Fanonian liberationist schemata’ (p.40). Quite the contrary, for according to Fanon, the dominant image of the colonized in the mind of the colonizer was that of: ‘Dirty Nigger, or simply, look a Negro’, dirty Arab, dirty Jew, or dirty Indian despite the fact that the colonized was remarkably clean compared to some filthy-rich members of the colonizing group.

Harrow also erred historically by asserting that ‘western decadence’ is the source of postmodernism whereas Jacques Derrida insisted that his deconstruction derived from his African cultural background, a view that is indirectly supported by Ron Eglash in African Fractalsand by Adbul Karim Banguara in Fractal Complexity in the Works of Major Black Thinkers. Recognizing African originality even in a western art form such as cinema would demand less obsession with trash and a greater focus on creativity and worthiness rather than worthlessness.

To his credit, Harrow throws in genuine concerns about inequality, revolution and protest about consumer capitalism and the export of toxic waste from the West to underdeveloped countries. The former President of Harvard University and former Obama economics adviser, Larry Summers, is quoted (pp21-22) as saying that there is a rational basis for rich countries to export toxic waste to poor countries because the lives of the poor are not as valuable as the lives of the rich. This is an indirect suggestion that the trash represented in African cinema may be part of the evidence for the mock trial of imperialism as dramatized in one of the films that he discussed. With a chapter on the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, Harrow may be indirectly calling for more films on the theme of environmental justice in Africa.

However, Harrow neglected to point out to readers that the trope of trash is not an African trope but a Western one. The importation of trash is actually less pronounced in Africa than in the developed countries where interstate trade and transportation of trash was ruled by the US Supreme Court in 1973 as legitimate commerce after Philadelphia sued New Jersey for attempting to block the transportation of out-of-state trash across state lines.

Pennsylvania and Virginia are the top importers of trash, not just from other states in the US but also from Canada and Mexico in line with NAFTA, and the dumps for such refuse are usually located near poor communities where racial minorities predominate. In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers do not need a search warrant to seek incriminating evidence by going through the garbage left on the kerb for collection by garbage collectors. Also, Sweden had so little trash due to recycling that trash was imported from Norway to help power their trash-fueled power generators.

By contrast, African societies, like most precapitalist societies, managed to go on for centuries without generating mountains of trash until the unhygienic Europeans, as Olaudah Equiano observed, came to dump the excrements of their excessive consumption on the relatively deprived. Yet, not even Cecil Rhodes saw Africa simply as a junkyard of trash, he saw the mineral wealth and set out to rob Africans of their land and stole their labor to exploit the riches. Harrow sees trash everywhere in Africa and thereby missed the morality, the wealth and the natural beauty that are even more preponderant in African cinema despite the occasional scenes of trash.

Instead of admitting that Africa is relatively unpolluted compared to the industrialized countries, Ken Harrow presents a fictional contrast between the suparmarche or supermarket in Paris and the trash ridden streets of Africa as represented in Sissoko’s La Vie sur Terre(1999) as if this is a contrast based on empirical reality that is verifiable in every part of Africa and every part of Paris – even the slums of Paris will have those gaudy supermarkets too while upper class reserved areas in Africa would be buried in rubbish. Harrow forgot that advice that his mother gave him, do not believe everything you see in the movies. His dirty mind saw even things that were not trash, such as shoes on the streets, as trash.

I recommend Ken Harrow’s Trash to readers who are looking for spoilers given that his detailed plot summaries of the movies in the book are so well written that readers may no longer need to see the films after reading his book. The consumer warning to the reader is to beware of the trash talk lest you fail to see the people, landscape, gold and diamonds due to the obsession of Harrow with filth and rubbish - the 'below' of his sub-title.

POSTED BY ODOZI OBODO <http://www.blogger.com/profile/04482441827170429284> AT 8:54 PM<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in-garbage-out.html> <http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=9198805368158959990&postID=3674092638110960408>
LABELS: CINEMA<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Cinema>, EMEAGWALI<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Emeagwali>, FANON<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Fanon>, HARROW<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Harrow>, JAMES<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/James>, NKRUMAH<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Nkrumah>,NOLLYWOOD<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Nollywood>, TRASH<http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/search/label/Trash>


On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino <biko...@yahoo.com<mailto:biko...@yahoo.com>> wrote:


Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out

Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:


http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in-garbage-out.html


__._,_.___
Reply via web post<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJza3UybmxzBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRtc2dJZAMzMTA4MTEEc2VjA2Z0cgRzbGsDcnBseQRzdGltZQMxMzY4MjQ0Nzk4?act=reply&messageNum=310811> Reply to sender <mailto:biko...@yahoo.com?subject=Re%3A%20Ken%20Harrow%27s%20Trash%20Discourse> Reply to group <mailto:NIgerianW...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Re%3A%20Ken%20Harrow%27s%20Trash%20Discourse> Start a New Topic<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJmcHFybjB2BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNudHBjBHN0aW1lAzEzNjgyNDQ3OTg-> Messages in this topic<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum/message/310278;_ylc=X3oDMTM5YzcwbW5oBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRtc2dJZAMzMTA4MTEEc2VjA2Z0cgRzbGsDdnRwYwRzdGltZQMxMzY4MjQ0Nzk4BHRwY0lkAzMxMDI3OA--> (6)
Recent Activity:

* New Members<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum/members;_ylc=X3oDMTJnOXNnZXZoBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2bWJycwRzdGltZQMxMzY4MjQ0Nzk4?o=6> 56

Visit Your Group<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum;_ylc=X3oDMTJma3NkNGY2BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzEzNjgyNDQ3OTg->
<http://groups.yahoo.com/;_ylc=X3oDMTJldDFoMnNpBF9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzI3MDY1Mjk5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTAxMzU1NgRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNnZnAEc3RpbWUDMTM2ODI0NDc5OA-->
Switch to: Text-Only<mailto:NIgerianWorldFo...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Change+Delivery+Format:+Traditional>, Daily Digest<mailto:NIgerianWorl...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Email+Delivery:+Digest> • Unsubscribe<mailto:NIgerianWorldFo...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe> • Terms of Use<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> • Send us Feedback <mailto:ygroupsnot...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Feedback+on+the+redesigned+individual+mail+v1>
.

__,_._,___



--





--
Professor Emeritus of French & History
St. Mary's College of Maryland, USA




Akurang-Parry, Kwabena

unread,
May 11, 2013, 4:09:22 PM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Bro Chidi:

I am not sure if you want me to respond to your brief below, or if it is meant for my in-law Papa Ikhide. Whatever be the case I wish you would not become one of those magisterial umpires.

Kwabena


________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara [chidi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 11:47 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html

Abdul Karim Bangura

unread,
May 11, 2013, 6:47:53 PM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
As a confessed Mwalimu Ken Harrow minion, I, Abdul Karim Bangura, am not sold on the label that he is "racist." An ultra liberal and blind Obama supporter? Yes! A "racist"? Nyet!
>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Biko Agozino
>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com"
>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>
>> Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>
>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>
>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>
>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
>>
>> Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
>>
>> http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in...
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
>> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
>> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
>> unsub...@googlegroups.com
>> ---
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com.

>> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
>> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
>> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
>> unsub...@googlegroups.com
>> ---
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com.

>> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>--
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com
>---
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com.

>For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>--
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com
>---
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com.

Ikhide

unread,
May 11, 2013, 6:24:12 PM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Yes, my wife, your sister is always saying I am too judgmental and
I think I am always right. She is my wife and she is always right. Of course, who wan die?

I assume though that people write these things because they want a reaction. I have given my feedback. Also, African intellectuals could use self-policing. Many of us are lazy and full of nothing but personal opinions. Someone writes a thoughtful book with a provocative title and all we can do is rise from the ashes of our mediocrity and yell "racist!"? Come on...

- Ikhide

Ikhide

unread,
May 11, 2013, 11:28:12 PM5/11/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
This is a cut- throat world you all live in. Someone disagrees with you and you douse his name with racist slurs. There is no premium on relationships, none whatsoever. I mean, why anyone would just wake up and start calling someone racist based on a garden variety disagreement beats me. Some people sha.

- Ikhide
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

Chidi Anthony Opara

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:04:59 AM5/12/13
to USA Africa Dialogue Series
"Bro Chidi:

I am not sure if you want me to respond to your brief below, or if it
is meant for my in-law Papa Ikhide. Whatever be the case I wish you
would not become one of those magisterial umpires.

-----Kwabena"

Kwabena,

I have not noticed any form of umpire mentality on your part.

CAO.

On May 11, 9:09 pm, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" <KAP...@ship.edu> wrote:
> Bro Chidi:
>
> I am not sure if you want me to respond to your brief below, or if it is meant for my in-law Papa Ikhide. Whatever be the case I wish you would not become one of those magisterial umpires.
>
> Kwabena
>
> ________________________________________
> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara [chidi.op...@gmail.com]

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

unread,
May 12, 2013, 9:42:55 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Agreed. Ken is not a racist - but I believe garbology and trash discourse as a field of study can
open the door for the real racists to triumph. When the Hutus conceptualized the Tutsis as
cockroaches they started a process that would eventually lead to untold horror. When you dehumanize people
conceptually, you prepare the pathway for destruction. If you see people
as trash, no matter how sophisticated the discourse, you open the gates of hell, unwittingly,
even though you may not be doing so deliberately.

Even if the poor are noble pieces of garbage and thrash, at some point in time they become disposable.
Trash is trash. The problem with garbology is that there is no exit strategy for the thrashed.
In any case, they are not distinguished from immovable objects. What prevents a Hitler from
exterminating them along with the vermin?

I would rather be a noble savage, or a monkey eating banana than a piece of garbage
lying along with infected needles and stench.

But I am here to learn. I am open to new concepts and ideas so if the garbologists on
the list can educate me and allay my concerns, they are most welcome.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora


On May 11, 2013, at 6:47 PM, Abdul Karim Bangura <th...@earthlink.net<mailto:th...@earthlink.net>> wrote:

As a confessed Mwalimu Ken Harrow minion, I, Abdul Karim Bangura, am not sold on the label that he is "racist." An ultra liberal and blind Obama supporter? Yes! A "racist"? Nyet!
-----Original Message-----
>From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena"
>Sent: May 11, 2013 4:09 PM
>To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>
>Bro Chidi:
>
>I am not sure if you want me to respond to your brief below, or if it is meant for my in-law Papa Ikhide. Whatever be the case I wish you would not become one of those magisterial umpires.
>
>Kwabena
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara [chidi...@gmail.com<mailto:chidi...@gmail.com>]
>Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 11:47 AM
>To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>
>“-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>one take to write a review-------?---------“
>-----Kwabena.
>
>The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>Literature.
>
>CAO.
>
>
>
>On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>
>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>
>> Kwabena
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>
>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>
>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>
>> - Ikhide
>>
>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Biko Agozino
>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>
>> Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>
>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>
>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>
>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
>>
>> Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
>>
>> http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in...
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
>> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
>> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
>> unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>
>> ---
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.
>> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
>> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
>> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
>> unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>
>> ---
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.
>> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>--
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>
>---
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.
>For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>--
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>
>---
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.
>For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

ibk...@gmail.com

unread,
May 12, 2013, 1:22:01 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Ikhide,

Lead the pack and walk the talk. Maybe others will follow you or at list listen to your angst because it is justifiable.

Maybe you and your fellow lazy "African intellectuals" over rate yourselves and are genuinely intellectually unqualified to adorn the toga of intellection.

You should all self appraise yourselves truthfully and tell each other the obvious truth. You have started the ball rolling laziness naturally denies an intellectual of that appellation. It means such a person has stopped thinking deeply and cannot articulate the thoughts or deploy them to useful ends.

Where then lies the basis to be called an intellectual? Maybe you share the error that acquisition of a diploma often by hook or crook of the GEJ variety earns one the title "African Intellectual."

Lest I forget your wife is absolutely correct on the point.

Cheers.

IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 18:24:12 -0400

ibk...@gmail.com

unread,
May 12, 2013, 1:08:11 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Ikhide!

What moral high ground gives you the justification to mount the pedestal from which you launch your condemnation of others with a fake halo of righteousness?

For many of us who over the years have read and followed your efforts, the immediate reaction is, "It does not lie in your mount". You do not possess the certificate of moral probity and cleanliness from slurring others either for real or in jest to stand in judgment or carpet others!

A case of Physician heal thyself.


Cheers.

IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 12:59:46 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com

response to Biko's review:


What is trash? that is the question that came to animate me as I wrote my book �Trash.� I am grateful that Biko Agozino took the trouble to read and even more to review my book. But I want to offer my own views of some of his comments, in the interest of having an exchange of ideas. I should try to cut to the chase of where I find shortcomings in Biko�s review. He writes, �The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.�

�

I see trash as operating on many levels, and in different orders of value. I don�t think Biko was willing to take �trash� as signifying more than worthless in a univocal sense. Without establishing the system of value within which worth is measured, that claim doesn�t convey anything. For instance, in the above quote, �who is trash,� he responds, �no one is worthless.� What is the point of that response? My question is provocative, as he rightly says, in the same way that the word �n�gre� was used by C�saire and Senghor in framing Negritude. The inspiration for my usage here was not in the response to Akudinobi, where I was stating that we critics of African cinema needed to get out of the mold we had fallen into for decades, which was to repeat the increasingly tired formulas about engag� or committed criticism. I believe that Biko�s values remain within that frame, without him seeing quite where I wanted to go beyond it.

�

When I used �trashy� originally, it was in the preface of my previous book, when I wrote, �It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in 40 years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view�a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.

����������� Something trashy, to begin, straight out of the Nigerian video handbook. Something sexy, without the trite poses of exotic behinds, spinning the ventilateur for the tourists. Something violent, etc�.� I called this a �new third cinema challenge.�

�

The cover of the book in which I wrote those words came from Bekolo�s �Aristotle�s Plot,� as did, of course, my reference to the need for a new poetics, following Bekolo. The way Biko frames my reference to Aristotle or trash misses entirely Bekolo�s point in that film. Biko writes, �the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: �If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African�, he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans.�

�

I wonder if it is necessary for me to respond, when Biko doesn�t seem to get the lines from Bekolo�s film. The person speaking is E.T. He is the figure in the film who represents the old school of African cinema, whose value he is trying to claim in challenging the tastes of the young �tsotsis� in the film who want to watch western action films. The ironic voice of the narrator, actually Bekolo�s voice, asks whether the new generation of African filmmakers are to be condemned to the same old notions of political filmmaking forever, whether they are not to be free to make films, like those �trashy� action films that entrance the young.

�

The answer is now clear. We have had our burgeoning revolution in African film criticism. We have an expanded opening onto a range of critical voices with Tcheuyup, Adesokan, Diawara, not to mention the terrific scholars of digital, video films�Haynes, Garritano, Okome. The approaches to African culture have expanded enormously with Mbembe, Olaniyan, Quayson, Gikandi.

�

For Biko these critics represent a threat because they don�t ground their theories or approaches in ancient egypt/cheikh Anta Diop, etc. In writing of Mbembe, he states that I �accepted Mbembe�s astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.� Biko misrepresents Mbembe completely, but in the same direction that he misunderstands my own intentions in turning to �trash.� He seems to imagine only old-school protests can carry the weight of critique today.

�

He cites me when I wrote that trash doesn�t figure in Fanon�s libertionist schema. The liberationist schema calls for solidarity and national liberation, throwing off colonial oppression, and ultimately neocolonialism. This approach had driven our embrace of revolutionary values from the outset. But it can�t drive the aesthetic choices, or intellectual development of African thinkers, forever. It would die from the fatigue of truth having turned into �truths.� That�s why Bekolo mocked E.T., and set out a new agenda for �New African Cinema,� one which Diawara has now celebrated in his most recent work.

�

This struggle between yesterday and tomorrow is also my own: I was as much a part of leftist critical theorizing and writing as anyone; and I am not suggesting we turn neocon in order to move beyond it. But trash is really the place to begin challenging the values/value systems to which we adhered for so long. I believe Gerima�s latest brilliant film Teza does exactly that�force us to question our earlier embrace of revolutionary rhetoric in which we had condemned new directions or critiques always as neocolonial or bourgeois. That�s why henri duparc was given such short shrift, unfortunately.

�

So Biko is right when he says the book is a wrestling match I had with myself. I wanted to walk in new steps, not in the same old ones. So I turned to those whom El Hadji calls �dechets humains,� human detritus, in Xala. The beggars thrown out of town by the �president� and the wealthy businessman. I wanted to stand next to jimmy cliff in The Harder They Come when he has fallen so low as to be forced to come to the rubbish tip where the desperately poor had to pick through the leftovers to survive. The camera takes us there; we need to follow, and then follow the lead through all those films and characters deemed trashy by high cultural value systems, follow down the same paths that lead us to the cartoons in Le Messager where Mbembe analyzes the cultural forms of autocracy that mark Cameroon today, where they are given a mocking gross form, a belly laugh, to dismiss their bloated pomposity.

�

When Biko writes, above, �No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers,� he misses the point of C�saire�s turn to the down and out when coming to embrace his Negritude. It is not that the poor and broken with whom he associated were not �worthless,� but that only by coming through the portals of what is deemed worthless can one move beyond the notions of superior that condemned them as �dechets humains.� That was C�saire�s own struggle, as he returned from Paris.

�

I am possibly going to continue to catch hell for my use of the term �trash��as one of my editors feared. Let it come. This is the time to fight against a new age of values that devalue �les damn�s de la terre��the wretched of the earth�more than ever. I don�t want to resolve this struggle as does Biko by saying, �No, we really aren�t trashy.� I don�t want to buy into a system by saying, we really have value, despite what you say. I want us to move where we are standing in to a location, not of culture, but of detritus, where we can reconstruct our vision. The defensive language, �no we really are�,� will not emerge from there, but something closer to the beggars� spit, with which Sembene ends Xala. That scene is gross, but restorative. Couldn�t have been done without abjection.

�

And now we have to look elsewhere, past Sembene, Fanon, Cesaire, or we will never catch up with Bekolo�s Saignantes, not to mention the �New Nollywood.�

�

�
On 5/10/13 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:

Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.


Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

Akurang-Parry, Kwabena

unread,
May 12, 2013, 12:53:40 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Papa Ikhide

 

Stop the name-calling and learn to take as much "nonsense" as you pour on people with your combative-driven reviews. What did I say about Ken's work that suggests that I am a racist? I have not read Ken's work in question. I posed simple questions to YOU in jest: "How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship?" Do these questions make me a racist? Give up the high horse you are trying to mount!

Ikhide

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:15:56 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, KAP...@ship.edu
Prof,

Please read me again. I understood your responses and I did not call you a racist, my comments were not directed at you. Simple. I could not have referred to you as a racist, because you did not say anything to me or to anyone on this playground that would qualify you as such. You are reading me too fast. Be well and Happy Mother's Day to you.




 
- Ikhide
 
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide



From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" <KAP...@ship.edu>
To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 12:53 AM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse

Ikhide

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:35:38 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, ibk...@gmail.com
IBK,

I have received your two missives, many thanks for it all. I seem to have struck a nerve somewhere in our past, I don't know. Whatever I have done to you or any of your loved ones in the past, abeg forgive me, I am blissfully unaware that you and I are now sworn enemies. I am sure all this big oyinbo ensuing from that your yeye blackberry is not as a result of what I have said since yesterday.

You should know me by now, I say my own and I laugh at the result - and the responses. The truth hurts. That is why you hear all that yelping and wailing. The laughter you hear in the canyon is mine, Esu galloping off. I shall be back. Of course.

And you, yeye man, a Happy Mother's Day to you and yours. You will not get hypertension on Ikhide's account. Ise. Be well. Doxology!

- Ikhide
 
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide



From: "ibk...@gmail.com" <ibk...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 1:08 AM

Abdul Bangura

unread,
May 12, 2013, 11:43:34 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Good Greetings my Wonderful Sister Mwalimu Gloria Emeagwali:
 
Indeed, at both the syntactic (sign vs. sign) and semantic (sign vs. concept/universe) levels, your concerns about "trash" are right on the proverbial money. Nonetheless, as I state in my book, The African National Anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika: A Pragmatic Linguistic Analysis, "pragmatics (sign vs. context) assumes that an acceptable answer to these questions is based on the image of meaning as a polyadic relation among conventionality-speaker/writer-situation-hearer/reader; semantics, a triadic relation between conventionality, language and to what it refers...." (Bangura, 2011:20).
 
I further state: "Imprecise terminology makes it difficult to distinguish the focus of Semantics and Pragmatics. This may be because psychologically, meaning is context, but logically and metaphysically, meaning is much more than psychological context; or put differently, whatever meaning may be, psychology is concerned with it only so far as it can be represented in terms of contextual imagery" (Bangura, 2011:20).
 
I say all this to make the point that Mwalimu Ken Harrow's work deserves a more systematic analysis because his use of the word "trash" seems to have called for comparable perspectives that would motivate drawing a boundary between langue and parole. But, as you correctly put it, and I feel similarly: "I am here to learn. I am open to new concepts and ideas; so if the garbologists on the list can educate me and allay my concerns, they are most welcome."
 
All this makes me now more worried about a chapter devoted to a linguistic analysis of an Oriki in my manuscript soon to go to press. The chapter was about 100 pages. I was forced by the editors to cut it down to half. I did so reluctantly and lost a great deal of the linguistic renderings that justify my postulates. I even mentioned that much longer chapters/journal articles are not uncommon in Linguistics and cited Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's 256-page article titled "Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomenon" in E. N. Goody (Ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (pp. 56-311), Cambridge University Press. Obviously, that did not convince them, as they were more keen to uniformity, as opposed to substance.
 
In Peace Always,
Abdul Karim Bangura/.
 
> [Original Message]
> From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
> Date: 5/12/2013 9:43:23 AM

> Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>
> Agreed. Ken is  not a racist -  but I believe garbology and trash discourse as a field of study can
> open the door for the real racists to triumph. When the Hutus conceptualized the Tutsis as
> cockroaches they started a process that would eventually lead to untold horror. When you dehumanize people
> conceptually, you prepare the pathway for destruction.  If you see people
> as trash, no matter how sophisticated the discourse, you open the gates of hell, unwittingly,
> even though you may not be doing so deliberately.
>
> Even if the poor are noble pieces of garbage and thrash,  at some point in time they become disposable.
> Trash is trash. The problem with garbology is that there is no exit strategy for the thrashed.
> In any case, they are  not distinguished from immovable objects. What prevents a Hitler from
> exterminating them along with the vermin?
>
> I would rather be a noble savage, or a monkey eating banana  than  a piece of garbage
> lying along with infected needles and stench.
>
> But I am here to learn. I am open to new concepts and ideas so if the garbologists on
> the list can educate me and allay my concerns,   they are most welcome.
>
>
> Professor Gloria Emeagwali
> Prof. of History & African Studies
> History Department
> Central Connecticut State University
> New Britain
> CT 06050
> africahistory.net
> vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
> Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
>
>
> On May 11, 2013, at 6:47 PM, Abdul Karim Bangura <th...@earthlink.net<mailto:th...@earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
> As a confessed Mwalimu Ken Harrow minion, I, Abdul Karim Bangura, am not sold on the label that he is "racist." An ultra liberal and blind Obama supporter? Yes! A "racist"? Nyet!
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena"
> >Sent: May 11, 2013 4:09 PM
> >To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
> >Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
> >
> >Bro Chidi:
> >
> >I am not sure if you want me to respond to your brief below, or if it is meant for my in-law Papa Ikhide. Whatever be the case I wish you would not become one of those magisterial umpires.
> >
> >Kwabena
> >
> >
> >________________________________________

> >Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 11:47 AM
> >To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
> >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
> >
> >�-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
> >one take to write a review-------?---------�
> >-----Kwabena.
> >
> >The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
> >Literature.
> >
> >CAO.
> >
> >
> >
> >On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
> >> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
> >>
> >> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
> >>
> >> Kwabena
> >>
> >> ________________________________

> >> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM

> >> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
> >>
> >> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
> >>
> >> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
> >>
> >> - Ikhide
> >>

> >> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
> >> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
> >>
> >> ________________________________
> >> From: Biko Agozino

> >> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
> >> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
> >>
> >> Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
> >>
> >> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
> >>
> >> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
> >>
> >> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
> >>
> >> Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
> >>
> >> http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in...
> >>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> >> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> >> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> >> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-

> >> ---
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

> >> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
> >>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> >> For current archives, visithttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> >> For previous archives, visithttp://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> >> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-

> >> ---
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

> >> For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
> >
> >--
> >You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> > For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> > For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> > To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

> > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-

> >---
> >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

> >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
> >
> >--
> >You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> > For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> > For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> > To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

> > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-

> >---
> >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue unsub...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

> >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
> >
> >
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-

> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

Abdul Bangura

unread,
May 12, 2013, 11:34:26 AM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Good Greetings my Wonderful Sister Mwalimu Gloria Emeagwali:
 
Indeed, at both the syntactic (sign vs. sign) and semantic (sign vs. concept/universe) levels, your concerns about "trash" are right on the proverbial money. Nonetheless, as I state in my book, The African National Anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika: A Pragmatic Linguistic Analysis, "pragmatics (sign vs. context) assumes that an acceptable answer to these questions is based on the image of meaning as a polyadic relation among conventionality-speaker/writer-situation-hearer/reader; semantics, a triadic relation between conventionality, language and to what it refers...." (Bangura, 2011:20).
 
I further state: "Imprecise terminology makes it difficult to distinguish the focus of Semantics and Pragmatics. This may be because psychologically, meaning is context, but logically and metaphysically, meaning is much more than psychological context; or put differently, whatever meaning may be, psychology is concerned with it only so far as it can be represented in terms of contextual imagery" (Bangura, 2011:20).
 
I say all this to make the point that Mwalima Ken Harrow's work deserves a more systematic analysis because his use of the word "trash" seems to have called for comparable perspectives that would motivate drawing a boundary between langue and parole. But, as you correctly put it, and I feel similarly: "I am here to learn. I am open to new concepts and ideas; so if the garbologists on the list can educate me and allay my concerns, they are most welcome."

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 1:01:29 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
hi gloria
i hope you will judge for yourself.
you write below, "when you dehumanize p eople as trash, you open the
gates of hell." agreed. the book doesn't dehumanize people as trash, but
tries to see the world from their point of view rather than that of
those who see them as trash.
ken
>> �-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>> one take to write a review-------?---------�
>> -----Kwabena.
>>
>> The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>> Literature.
>>
>> CAO.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>>
>>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>>
>>> Kwabena
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>
>>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>>
>>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>>
>>> - Ikhide
>>>
>>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: Biko Agozino
>>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>
>>> Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>>
>>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>>
>>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>>
>>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

unread,
May 12, 2013, 3:17:20 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Many decades ago, as an undergraduate, I signed up for a course in Linguistics.

Well I should have stayed in the class because, had I done so, what you said would have made more sense to me.

I guess it's too late now.


GE


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora


________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Abdul Bangura [th...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 11:34 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com; usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

unread,
May 12, 2013, 4:03:49 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
That is why I say that garbiologists have no exit strategy.



What is the point of view of a piece of trash.You are in the gutter sharing your bed with infected needles and

scum. Whatever you produce is also trash, including the Nollywood screenplay you scribbled on toilet paper.





I imagine that since you are supposedly human, you would want to get out of the bin.
Unless of course garbologists and their sympathisers condemn you there for life.



But what is their gameplan in any case? Are they setting you up to throw you in the incinerator?



Or should you wait for one nice slick garbologist, with piteous eyes and veiled insults

to come and rescue you from the garbage pit. And even that would be difficult because you and the garbage around

you are the same.





Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 1:01 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse

>> “-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>> one take to write a review-------?---------“
>> -----Kwabena.
>>
>> The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>> Literature.
>>
>> CAO.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>>
>>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>>
>>> Kwabena
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>
>>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>>
>>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>>
>>> - Ikhide
>>>
>>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: Biko Agozino
>>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>
>>> Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>>
>>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>>
>>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>>
>>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Biko Agozino

unread,
May 12, 2013, 6:35:12 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Bro Ken,

Thanks for your detailed response and many more thasnks for the respect of formality in the capital letters for starting people's names and the first letters of your sentences, quite unlike your online shakara equality of all lower-case compositions. Any goat that bleats that my review was not respectful of your scholarship should just be left alone to go on bleating. I salute you for taking my critique seriously.

You seem to have missed my point about Mbembe, Mudimbe and Battaille: you cite them without any critique and that is disappointing. I want to know if you disagree with them in any way. Where in your book did you offer a serious critique of their formulations? Are Africans without heads or was Africa invented by Europe as Chimamanda Adichie critiqued in The Danger of the Single Story?

You are welcome to profess your trashitude but you are mistaken to claim that you derive the strange view that trash talk is more important than human freedom from the negritude of our ancestor, Cesaire who was influenced by the glorious Harlem Renaissance.

When Cesaire defiantly thumbed his broad nose at arrogant Eurocentrists with the exclamation: 'Hurray to those who have invented nothing!', he was being ironic given the awesome inventions by people of African descent that only standing on his head like Hegel would be too prejudiced to see. Moreover, Cesaire was proclaiming the basic truism that human beings are more important than inventions because if only people who invented something should be allowed to live, what a sad world it would be. Even babies and old grand parents, the wretched of the earth and the sick or the insane, remain human beings who deserve not to be called worthless people or described as trash. But if you really love the word trash in spite of well meaning advice from colleagues against hubris, then apply the 'adjectival appellative' (to quote Jerry Dibua on Development and Diffusionism) to yourself and your loved ones. Is your work full of trash? Worthless?

The danger in your trash discourse is that a lot of uncritical and lazy Africanists would allow your epistemic violence to diffuse into their own mimetic work and before you know it, Africans will be equated with trash because of the bigmanism of the author who made this claim without empirical evidence but based on fleeting scenes in films that are not supposed to be true. Sister Gloria is right that we must not understimate the power of discourse as the precursor to genocide - the whole point of Derrida's critique of Hegel and Levis-Strauss in Of Grammatology.

Keep on wrestling with yourself if you must, I will keep shaking my head at that. Keep waiting for another Aristotle if you prefer, Diop could have shown you that Aristotle was predated by thousands of years of African thought that he appropriated and that he relatively distorted. Whatever you do, never assume that you are always right in your scholarship: Your editor and your colleagues cannot all be wrong to point out to you that your ideological representation of Africans as trash is both insensitive and factually flawed. A change of title would not correct this flaw as some of your follow-follow minions imply: the ideology that describing people as trash is more important than human freedom is nothing but complete rubbish.

Keep up the work you are doing for African cinema. But be ready to be re-educated and to learn something new from Africa instead of posing as the infallible teacher. Africa is people, said Achebe, not trash!

Biko


From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 12 May 2013, 0:59

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
response to Biko's review:

What is trash? that is the question that came to animate me as I wrote my book “Trash.” I am grateful that Biko Agozino took the trouble to read and even more to review my book. But I want to offer my own views of some of his comments, in the interest of having an exchange of ideas. I should try to cut to the chase of where I find shortcomings in Biko’s review. He writes, “The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.”
 
I see trash as operating on many levels, and in different orders of value. I don’t think Biko was willing to take “trash” as signifying more than worthless in a univocal sense. Without establishing the system of value within which worth is measured, that claim doesn’t convey anything. For instance, in the above quote, “who is trash,” he responds, “no one is worthless.” What is the point of that response? My question is provocative, as he rightly says, in the same way that the word “nègre” was used by Césaire and Senghor in framing Negritude. The inspiration for my usage here was not in the response to Akudinobi, where I was stating that we critics of African cinema needed to get out of the mold we had fallen into for decades, which was to repeat the increasingly tired formulas about engagé or committed criticism. I believe that Biko’s values remain within that frame, without him seeing quite where I wanted to go beyond it.
 
When I used “trashy” originally, it was in the preface of my previous book, when I wrote, “It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in 40 years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view—a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.
            Something trashy, to begin, straight out of the Nigerian video handbook. Something sexy, without the trite poses of exotic behinds, spinning the ventilateur for the tourists. Something violent, etc….” I called this a “new third cinema challenge.”
 
The cover of the book in which I wrote those words came from Bekolo’s “Aristotle’s Plot,” as did, of course, my reference to the need for a new poetics, following Bekolo. The way Biko frames my reference to Aristotle or trash misses entirely Bekolo’s point in that film. Biko writes, “the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: ‘If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African’, he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans.”
 
I wonder if it is necessary for me to respond, when Biko doesn’t seem to get the lines from Bekolo’s film. The person speaking is E.T. He is the figure in the film who represents the old school of African cinema, whose value he is trying to claim in challenging the tastes of the young “tsotsis” in the film who want to watch western action films. The ironic voice of the narrator, actually Bekolo’s voice, asks whether the new generation of African filmmakers are to be condemned to the same old notions of political filmmaking forever, whether they are not to be free to make films, like those “trashy” action films that entrance the young.
 
The answer is now clear. We have had our burgeoning revolution in African film criticism. We have an expanded opening onto a range of critical voices with Tcheuyup, Adesokan, Diawara, not to mention the terrific scholars of digital, video films—Haynes, Garritano, Okome. The approaches to African culture have expanded enormously with Mbembe, Olaniyan, Quayson, Gikandi.
 
For Biko these critics represent a threat because they don’t ground their theories or approaches in ancient egypt/cheikh Anta Diop, etc. In writing of Mbembe, he states that I “accepted Mbembe’s astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.” Biko misrepresents Mbembe completely, but in the same direction that he misunderstands my own intentions in turning to “trash.” He seems to imagine only old-school protests can carry the weight of critique today.
 
He cites me when I wrote that trash doesn’t figure in Fanon’s libertionist schema. The liberationist schema calls for solidarity and national liberation, throwing off colonial oppression, and ultimately neocolonialism. This approach had driven our embrace of revolutionary values from the outset. But it can’t drive the aesthetic choices, or intellectual development of African thinkers, forever. It would die from the fatigue of truth having turned into “truths.” That’s why Bekolo mocked E.T., and set out a new agenda for “New African Cinema,” one which Diawara has now celebrated in his most recent work.
 
This struggle between yesterday and tomorrow is also my own: I was as much a part of leftist critical theorizing and writing as anyone; and I am not suggesting we turn neocon in order to move beyond it. But trash is really the place to begin challenging the values/value systems to which we adhered for so long. I believe Gerima’s latest brilliant film Teza does exactly that—force us to question our earlier embrace of revolutionary rhetoric in which we had condemned new directions or critiques always as neocolonial or bourgeois. That’s why henri duparc was given such short shrift, unfortunately.
 
So Biko is right when he says the book is a wrestling match I had with myself. I wanted to walk in new steps, not in the same old ones. So I turned to those whom El Hadji calls “dechets humains,” human detritus, in Xala. The beggars thrown out of town by the “president” and the wealthy businessman. I wanted to stand next to jimmy cliff in The Harder They Come when he has fallen so low as to be forced to come to the rubbish tip where the desperately poor had to pick through the leftovers to survive. The camera takes us there; we need to follow, and then follow the lead through all those films and characters deemed trashy by high cultural value systems, follow down the same paths that lead us to the cartoons in Le Messager where Mbembe analyzes the cultural forms of autocracy that mark Cameroon today, where they are given a mocking gross form, a belly laugh, to dismiss their bloated pomposity.
 
When Biko writes, above, “No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers,” he misses the point of Césaire’s turn to the down and out when coming to embrace his Negritude. It is not that the poor and broken with whom he associated were not “worthless,” but that only by coming through the portals of what is deemed worthless can one move beyond the notions of superior that condemned them as “dechets humains.” That was Césaire’s own struggle, as he returned from Paris.
 
I am possibly going to continue to catch hell for my use of the term “trash”—as one of my editors feared. Let it come. This is the time to fight against a new age of values that devalue “les damnés de la terre”—the wretched of the earth—more than ever. I don’t want to resolve this struggle as does Biko by saying, “No, we really aren’t trashy.” I don’t want to buy into a system by saying, we really have value, despite what you say. I want us to move where we are standing in to a location, not of culture, but of detritus, where we can reconstruct our vision. The defensive language, “no we really are…,” will not emerge from there, but something closer to the beggars’ spit, with which Sembene ends Xala. That scene is gross, but restorative. Couldn’t have been done without abjection.
 
And now we have to look elsewhere, past Sembene, Fanon, Cesaire, or we will never catch up with Bekolo’s Saignantes, not to mention the “New Nollywood.”
 
 
On 5/10/13 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:

Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.


Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 
-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu
--

Ikhide

unread,
May 12, 2013, 7:10:50 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, usaafric...@googlegroups.com, biko...@yahoo.com
Biko,

Many thanks for yet another silly retort. And the moral of the story here is: Never ever write a revenge "review." It always diminishes and humiliates you. For life. If I was you, I would stop making it worse. Writing rejoinders on top of that huge fart makes your situation worse. All sizzle and no suya. Pompous twaddle. Bullcrap. Unmitigated bullcrap. Not only was your "review" unethical, (writing a retaliatory "review" against a perceived adversary) it showed you off as simply lazy. Nonsense.

If you want to know why your "review" flew like a lead balloon, it is because it made no sense. A handful of people probably read it, shrugged their shoulders and moved on. Another opportunity to engage serious scholarship missed because of course it is easy to do the lazy thing. Your yeye "review" deserves to die unread and unmourned because it is petulant nonsense. And poorly written to boot. I am embarrassed for you sef, yeye man.

This is the 21st century, you should be embarrassed, your colleague says something you don't want to hear and you fling the race card on the ground, foul, is all you can wail. Lazy man! 

Keep fooling yourself. Nobody missed your point, you have none. You sir are the goat, not me, and a silly one too. You were trying to be a mean bully and you came across as a mean bully and one that is not particularly bright. And you wonder why your continent is where it is. It is insincere bullcrap artists like you that think empty words are enough to run systems. Give us a break abeg. Yeye man. And go and burn your stupid "review." Who cares? It stinks!

Good night. I am reading the same book and I am happy to say I do not recognize the book in your " review." And who needs you to tell me what is racist or not? I put your name for my visa? Nonsense! 

Goodnight, go and sin no more!

- Ikhide

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 7:41:34 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
gloria
well, in the case of Xala, the end is a symbolic act in which the rich
man, el hadj,who represents the bourgeoisie in neocolonial senegal,
undergoes a ritual enactment of a "cure" for his "impotency," where the
beggars and handicapped invade his fancy house, and spit on him. sembene
was enacting a revolution of the disenfranchised, in which an african
act of solidarity and revolt/revoltingness was intended to reclaim him.
this is not an act of pity from the superior filmmaker, but of
solidarity and revolution. and most of all, a way to bring the truths of
neocolonialism to his senegalese audience.
i don't know if you have read Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to My
Native Land, where cesaire finds a similar need for restitution of his
soul, his identity, from having assimilated to a european, cultured,
high culture status, which distanced him from his homeland and its poor,
and goes through a similar passage through identifying with destitution
to find his black identity, his negritude.
it is perhaps the greatest work of caribbean literature.
i don't want to phrase this as a gesture of sympathy, but closer to
solidarity; not seeing those poor people from on high, but of seeing the
world from below. more importantly, it isn't so much seeing the world,
but seeing the film through eyes whose perspective is not defined by
european high cultural values.
it isn't so as to find a gameplan to rescue people, but a reading of
texts, of culture, from the standpoint i am defining as below, rather
than above. those simple terms have meaning to me, and trash is a handy
way to define it. once i started on this, i began to see manifestations
of it in scene after scene, trope after trope, text after text. and then
i discovered the field of garbology, but often that turned to things
like disposal of rubbish and recycling.
ken
>>> �-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>>> one take to write a review-------?---------�
>>> -----Kwabena.
>>>
>>> The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>>> Literature.
>>>
>>> CAO.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>>>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>>>
>>>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>>>
>>>> Kwabena
>>>>
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>>>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>>>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>
>>>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>>>
>>>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>>>
>>>> - Ikhide
>>>>
>>>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>>>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>>>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>>>
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: Biko Agozino
>>>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>>>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>>>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>
>>>> Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>>>
>>>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>>>
>>>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>>>
>>>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 8:17:07 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
dear biko
please don't get too excited over my use of capital letters before. i was writing in Word, and it did the caps for me. i don't quite know how not to do it.
i really enjoy speeding along in lower case, and please don't take it as a sign of disrespect. i find it cool, even if you think it is trashy of me.
you have a point about my not critiquing mbembe, mudimbe, bataille. but what do you want? should i be critiquing everyone i cite? i do respect those thinkers a great deal; i also do have serious critiques of mbembe's On the Postcolony, but those are not relevant to my argument; and i also feel great respect for his work. i have less to critique in mudimbe, honestly. he is one of the giants who changed the whole field of african studies, as far as i am concerned.
i do not interpret my attempts to see the world "from below" as being in any way whatsoever in contradiction with the struggle for freedom, dignity, worth of the formerly colonized or african peoples. not at all. it isn't, biko, it is just another tack, another angle, which gives me new ways to see the possibilities of transvaluation. i really do think i am very close in spirit to what cesaire was doing. remember that scene on the bus, where he sees the exhausted, large black man? where he excoriates himself for having occupied the position of those who saw and judged and condemned that man--as ugly, etc etc? that was a position he felt he could not occupy at the beginning of the poem when he spoke of becoming the spokesman for his people. he saw himself as having been arrogant and presumptuous, and needed to go through that moment of descending down to the level of the man on the bus to be able to find his negritude.
and when he was able to descend to that level, then he was able to embrace not only himself, but those "who never invented anything." yes, they are "nothing" or trash in european eyes; but when he shed the perspective of those eyes, shed the superior position of "spokesman" for them, then he was able to identify a negritude that could soar. he is ironic, as you say, but more than that, he transvalues european values to get there.

you can take that as the gesture that seeks a new poetics; the new aristotle for that poetics is surely black, at least if coming from cesaire's "below," and i hope from what i try to excavate in my study.
if you will permit me, i do not think i am anything like infallible. to the contrary. i don't know why you would imagine i think that is the case. let's just leave it at that.

last thing: it is going through the bottom, the bottoms, that cesaire is able to turn the lowly and defeated into something unimaginable that soars. that is how i see trash, a discarded and worthless object in one system that gets turned, that turns, that is able to be turned or turn itself into something of considerable value in a new system. i am reaching for something that goes beyond the notion of recycling, which trivializes it. it is, in a sense, closer to deconstruction where the destabilization of a dominant system makes possible the elaboration of a new, more positive one. that's how i would want to read the end of The Harder They Come, when jimmy cliff is transformed from ivan, the defeated, into the "star" we know as jimmy cliff.

ken


On 5/12/13 6:35 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:
Bro Ken,

Thanks for your detailed response and many more thasnks for the respect of formality in the capital letters for starting people's names and the first letters of your sentences, quite unlike your online shakara equality of all lower-case compositions. Any goat that bleats that my review was not respectful of your scholarship should just be left alone to go on bleating. I salute you for taking my critique seriously.

You seem to have missed my point about Mbembe, Mudimbe and Battaille: you cite them without any critique and that is disappointing. I want to know if you disagree with them in any way. Where in your book did you offer a serious critique of their formulations? Are Africans without heads or was Africa invented by Europe as Chimamanda Adichie critiqued in The Danger of the Single Story?

You are welcome to profess your trashitude but you are mistaken to claim that you derive the strange view that trash talk is more important than human freedom from the negritude of our ancestor, Cesaire who was influenced by the glorious Harlem Renaissance.

When Cesaire defiantly thumbed his broad nose at arrogant Eurocentrists with the exclamation: 'Hurray to those who have invented nothing!', he was being ironic given the awesome inventions by people of African descent that only standing on his head like Hegel would be too prejudiced to see. Moreover, Cesaire was proclaiming the basic truism that human beings are more important than inventions because if only people who invented something should be allowed to live, what a sad world it would be. Even babies and old grand parents, the wretched of the earth and the sick or the insane, remain human beings who deserve not to be called worthless people or described as trash. But if you really love the word trash in spite of well meaning advice from colleagues against hubris, then apply the 'adjectival appellative' (to quote Jerry Dibua on Development and Diffusionism) to yourself and your loved ones. Is your work full of trash? Worthless?

The danger in your trash discourse is that a lot of uncritical and lazy Africanists would allow your epistemic violence to diffuse into their own mimetic work and before you know it, Africans will be equated with trash because of the bigmanism of the author who made this claim without empirical evidence but based on fleeting scenes in films that are not supposed to be true. Sister Gloria is right that we must not understimate the power of discourse as the precursor to genocide - the whole point of Derrida's critique of Hegel and Levis-Strauss in Of Grammatology.

Keep on wrestling with yourself if you must, I will keep shaking my head at that. Keep waiting for another Aristotle if you prefer, Diop could have shown you that Aristotle was predated by thousands of years of African thought that he appropriated and that he relatively distorted. Whatever you do, never assume that you are always right in your scholarship: Your editor and your colleagues cannot all be wrong to point out to you that your ideological representation of Africans as trash is both insensitive and factually flawed. A change of title would not correct this flaw as some of your follow-follow minions imply: the ideology that describing people as trash is more important than human freedom is nothing but complete rubbish.

Keep up the work you are doing for African cinema. But be ready to be re-educated and to learn something new from Africa instead of posing as the infallible teacher. Africa is people, said Achebe, not trash!

Biko


From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 12 May 2013, 0:59
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
response to Biko's review:
On 5/10/13 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:

Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.


Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

unread,
May 12, 2013, 9:33:20 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com


What I have learnt from all this is that you cannot really argue with film or literary critics.
They can always find an imaginary fictional character, who never existed on this planet, to make their case.

You seem to have a thing with Jimmy Cliff. Ah well, that is much better than singing Belafonte's banana boat

song.

However, I honestly appreciate your taking the time to respond to my comments - even though you seemed to have missed the

point. But that is OK. You can get it if you really want.







Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 7:41 PM
>>> “-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>>> one take to write a review-------?---------“
>>> -----Kwabena.
>>>
>>> The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>>> Literature.
>>>
>>> CAO.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>>>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>>>
>>>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>>>
>>>> Kwabena
>>>>
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>>>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>>>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>
>>>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>>>
>>>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>>>
>>>> - Ikhide
>>>>
>>>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>>>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>>>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>>>
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: Biko Agozino
>>>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>>>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>>>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>
>>>> Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>>>
>>>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>>>
>>>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>>>
>>>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Biko Agozino

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:15:25 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
For Ken,

'I love trash'
Slogan of Oscar
The monster of Sesame Street
But Oscar is far from trash
Outer space is choke-full
Of space Junk
But only a lunatic
Imagines that the man
On the moon is trash
America trades in more trash
Than the whole of Africa
And has a movie called 'Trash'
But America remains
Land of the beautiful
Our man from Ewu (Goat)
Sees every word as retaliatory
Because he is too lazy to scribble
A book of his own and enjoy
The privilege of being critiqued
Without anger or annoyance
No giant is above critique
Yab them, yab them, yab them!
Urged Fela's fans, not his trash
'Let the donkey brae'
Said Doctor Eric Williams
with his ear-plugs firmly on

Biko


From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 12 May 2013, 20:17
What is trash? that is the question that came to animate me as I wrote my book “Trash.” I am grateful that Biko Agozino took the trouble to read and even more to review my book. But I want to offer my own views of some of his comments, in the interest of having an exchange of ideas. I should try to cut to the chase of where I find shortcomings in Biko’s review. He writes, “The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.”
 
I see trash as operating on many levels, and in different orders of value. I don’t think Biko was willing to take “trash” as signifying more than worthless in a univocal sense. Without establishing the system of value within which worth is measured, that claim doesn’t convey anything. For instance, in the above quote, “who is trash,” he responds, “no one is worthless.” What is the point of that response? My question is provocative, as he rightly says, in the same way that the word “nègre” was used by Césaire and Senghor in framing Negritude. The inspiration for my usage here was not in the response to Akudinobi, where I was stating that we critics of African cinema needed to get out of the mold we had fallen into for decades, which was to repeat the increasingly tired formulas about engagé or committed criticism. I believe that Biko’s values remain within that frame, without him seeing quite where I wanted to go beyond it.
 
When I used “trashy” originally, it was in the preface of my previous book, when I wrote, “It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in 40 years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view—a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.
            Something trashy, to begin, straight out of the Nigerian video handbook. Something sexy, without the trite poses of exotic behinds, spinning the ventilateur for the tourists. Something violent, etc….” I called this a “new third cinema challenge.”
 
The cover of the book in which I wrote those words came from Bekolo’s “Aristotle’s Plot,” as did, of course, my reference to the need for a new poetics, following Bekolo. The way Biko frames my reference to Aristotle or trash misses entirely Bekolo’s point in that film. Biko writes, “the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: ‘If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African’, he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans.”
 
I wonder if it is necessary for me to respond, when Biko doesn’t seem to get the lines from Bekolo’s film. The person speaking is E.T. He is the figure in the film who represents the old school of African cinema, whose value he is trying to claim in challenging the tastes of the young “tsotsis” in the film who want to watch western action films. The ironic voice of the narrator, actually Bekolo’s voice, asks whether the new generation of African filmmakers are to be condemned to the same old notions of political filmmaking forever, whether they are not to be free to make films, like those “trashy” action films that entrance the young.
 
The answer is now clear. We have had our burgeoning revolution in African film criticism. We have an expanded opening onto a range of critical voices with Tcheuyup, Adesokan, Diawara, not to mention the terrific scholars of digital, video films—Haynes, Garritano, Okome. The approaches to African culture have expanded enormously with Mbembe, Olaniyan, Quayson, Gikandi.
 
For Biko these critics represent a threat because they don’t ground their theories or approaches in ancient egypt/cheikh Anta Diop, etc. In writing of Mbembe, he states that I “accepted Mbembe’s astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.” Biko misrepresents Mbembe completely, but in the same direction that he misunderstands my own intentions in turning to “trash.” He seems to imagine only old-school protests can carry the weight of critique today.
 
He cites me when I wrote that trash doesn’t figure in Fanon’s libertionist schema. The liberationist schema calls for solidarity and national liberation, throwing off colonial oppression, and ultimately neocolonialism. This approach had driven our embrace of revolutionary values from the outset. But it can’t drive the aesthetic choices, or intellectual development of African thinkers, forever. It would die from the fatigue of truth having turned into “truths.” That’s why Bekolo mocked E.T., and set out a new agenda for “New African Cinema,” one which Diawara has now celebrated in his most recent work.
 
This struggle between yesterday and tomorrow is also my own: I was as much a part of leftist critical theorizing and writing as anyone; and I am not suggesting we turn neocon in order to move beyond it. But trash is really the place to begin challenging the values/value systems to which we adhered for so long. I believe Gerima’s latest brilliant film Teza does exactly that—force us to question our earlier embrace of revolutionary rhetoric in which we had condemned new directions or critiques always as neocolonial or bourgeois. That’s why henri duparc was given such short shrift, unfortunately.
 
So Biko is right when he says the book is a wrestling match I had with myself. I wanted to walk in new steps, not in the same old ones. So I turned to those whom El Hadji calls “dechets humains,” human detritus, in Xala. The beggars thrown out of town by the “president” and the wealthy businessman. I wanted to stand next to jimmy cliff in The Harder They Come when he has fallen so low as to be forced to come to the rubbish tip where the desperately poor had to pick through the leftovers to survive. The camera takes us there; we need to follow, and then follow the lead through all those films and characters deemed trashy by high cultural value systems, follow down the same paths that lead us to the cartoons in Le Messager where Mbembe analyzes the cultural forms of autocracy that mark Cameroon today, where they are given a mocking gross form, a belly laugh, to dismiss their bloated pomposity.
 
When Biko writes, above, “No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers,” he misses the point of Césaire’s turn to the down and out when coming to embrace his Negritude. It is not that the poor and broken with whom he associated were not “worthless,” but that only by coming through the portals of what is deemed worthless can one move beyond the notions of superior that condemned them as “dechets humains.” That was Césaire’s own struggle, as he returned from Paris.
 
I am possibly going to continue to catch hell for my use of the term “trash”—as one of my editors feared. Let it come. This is the time to fight against a new age of values that devalue “les damnés de la terre”—the wretched of the earth—more than ever. I don’t want to resolve this struggle as does Biko by saying, “No, we really aren’t trashy.” I don’t want to buy into a system by saying, we really have value, despite what you say. I want us to move where we are standing in to a location, not of culture, but of detritus, where we can reconstruct our vision. The defensive language, “no we really are…,” will not emerge from there, but something closer to the beggars’ spit, with which Sembene ends Xala. That scene is gross, but restorative. Couldn’t have been done without abjection.
 
And now we have to look elsewhere, past Sembene, Fanon, Cesaire, or we will never catch up with Bekolo’s Saignantes, not to mention the “New Nollywood.”
 
 
On 5/10/13 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:

Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.


Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 
-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 
-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:21:39 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
it's catching!
On 5/10/13 11:59 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:

Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out


Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.


Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
�
�

kenneth harrow

unread,
May 12, 2013, 10:19:18 PM5/12/13
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
cute. well, i'll try and i'll try!
>>>> �-----In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must
>>>> one take to write a review-------?---------�
>>>> -----Kwabena.
>>>>
>>>> The umpire mentality! One of the banes of contemporary African
>>>> Literature.
>>>>
>>>> CAO.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 11 May, 16:19, "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" wrote:
>>>>> Ikhide, My Brother-In-Law:
>>>>>
>>>>> My sister, or better still, your wife, has told me that you are too judgmental and think that you are always right. How do you make the determination that Papa Biko's review was "rushed"? In fact, how many hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. must one take to write a review, and how do you situate rigor in periodizing a work of scholarship? In the end, you realize that your take is as much an opinion as Biko's.
>>>>>
>>>>> Kwabena
>>>>>
>>>>> ________________________________
>>>>> From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] on behalf of Ikhide [xoki...@yahoo.com<http://yahoo.com>]
>>>>> Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 9:08 AM
>>>>> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
>>>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>>
>>>>> Hmmm. Interesting. This "review" as inchoate and rushed as it is, is a commentary on how many of us do the business of "intellectual discourse." I know the genesis of this petty-minded "review." Many will recall Biko Agozino's musing that the Boston bombings may have been racially motivated. And Kenn Harrow's push back (and mine) that it wasn't. Well, you would think that this would be an opportunity for rational respectful conversation. No, not Agozino, like many African intellectuals who are only used to giving lectures, who hate having conversations, he fought back - like a bully. He reminded Kenn that he had his book, Trash, and made veiled threats about the nature of the "discourse" in the book, and how he is just reading it and he would share his thoughts in due course. Any dolt could have imagined that the review would be caustic. Agozino need not have bothered.
>>>>>
>>>>> And so we have the "review." A poorly thought out essay that diminishes the author immensely - as a petty little man with a PhD. And diminsishes scholarship because I am sure that underneath all that bluster is some scholarship worth reading. Which is a shame. Professor Harrow's book is a thoughtful contribution to the subject, one that deserves a thoughtful, balanced review. Agozino's does not improve upon the silence, it only muddies the waters where there once was clarity. In my world, given the history between Agozino and Harrow, he would have had to recuse himself from reviewing the book. No, that is now how we roll. We are mean like that. Nonsense.
>>>>>
>>>>> - Ikhide
>>>>>
>>>>> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://atwww.xokigbo.com>
>>>>> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
>>>>> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>>>>>
>>>>> ________________________________
>>>>> From: Biko Agozino
>>>>> To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>"
>>>>> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 11:59 PM
>>>>> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ken Harrow's Trash Discourse
>>>>>
>>>>> Ken Harrow�s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
>>>>>
>>>>> Reviewed by Biko Agozino
>>>>>
>>>>> Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: �The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards� (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
>>>>>
>>>>> Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are �worthless people�. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. �What is worthless? Who is trash?� He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages