Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 01:08:46 -0400
To: Athena Discuss 
Subject: Re: Concerning Afro-kitsch

FISHERGM@jmu.edu wrote:
(( cuts ))
> Thanks for an eloquent and forceful reply.  Actually, I did
> unsubscribe until this afternoon.  I thought about lurking,
> but decided that would be breaking my word.  What happened
> is that I came across the book *Black Popular Culture* in
> the "new books" section of our library (despite the fact
> that it was published in 1992), and then came across the
> essay by Diawara.  I resubscribed to the list to get
> comments on it, just as I said.  From what I've learned
> so far about the Afrocentrism movement led me to believe
> that his criticism was probably unfair.  And I resubscribed
> to the list because I like to learn. 

I guess that's why we are all here.  As for me, having 
been schooled in the "hard" sciences, Diop and the 
afrocentrists came as quite a revelation.  I had been
taught a blinkered view of Africans and their origins.
Diop, James and others opened my eyes.  None of the
tendentious, albeit scholarly, quibbling I have seen
exhibited on this list by Meadows, Daniels, Willet
and others it seems to me has defeated the core claims
of the afrocentrists: (1) ancient Egypt was black African
in origin, and (2) ancient Egypt is the true source of much
of the ancient wisdom conventionally attributed to the
Greeks.  The first requires merely the evidence of
one's own senses, as a trip to Egypt and a look at the
statuary and paintings would rather quickly 
confirm, but there is ample evidence in the historical
accounts as well (Herordotus, Diodorus, Aristotle and others).
No amount of source criticism and other scholarly  
pretensions can oversome that basic truth.  As to the
second, Diop made a charge of plagiarism against various
venerable Greeks, asserting at least a prima facie case in support
of the charge.  Thus far, I have seen nothing on this list
that would cause me to believe that Diop was wrong in his
overall assessment.  Even axiomatic argument, that supposedly
exclusive invention of the Greeks, appears a questionable
attribution.  It emerged essentially by accident on this
list that the "calculus" (so translated) that Plato had
Socrates attributing to the Egyptians, appeared in the
original Greek as "logismos", distinguished in context
from arithmetic, geometric and astronomic calculi.  To
the obvious query why not "logic calculus", for the kind
of calculus denoted by "logismos" (= "logic-ism" in literal
translation) which could rather obviously be identified with 
the syllogistic reckoning that is at the foundation of the axiomatic
method, I get no clear answer, but I'm told by the arch-pedant of the
group, Peter Daniels, to listen to the experts.  Meantime
the linguistic expert on the group, Mr. Willet, promises
to investigate the "semantic domain" of logismos, but
is never again heard on the subject.  So, I too am here
to learn, and I'm learning a lot...about Greeks, Egyptians,
afrocentrists, and--through a sort of logic-ism in which
I am well trained--that supposedly mythical creature
whose very existence is denied, the eurocentrist.

> Gordon Fisher     fishergm@jmu.edu

Regards,

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