The pitfalls of cultural consciousness

Philosophia Africana, March, 2007 by Chielozona Eze

Notes

(1.) McMillan-Steward Lecture, Harvard University (1998).

(2.) Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38. Henceforth cited as HE.

(3.) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).

(4.) For examples of European racialist conceptions of Africa to which Achebe and a number of other African writers have responded and continue to respond, see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997); see also Olufemi Taiwo "Exorcising Hegel's Ghost: Africa's Challenge to Philosophy," in African Studies Quarterly, available on-line at http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/2.htm (visited Dec. 10, 2006).

(5.) Neil ten Kortenaar, "How the Center Is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart., in Isidore Okpewho, ed., Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137. Henceforth cited as HCH.

(6.) James Olney, Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 169.

(7.) See Chima Anyadike, "Duality and Resilience in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart," this edition of Philosophia Africana, 49-58.

(8.) Frederic Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," 15 Social Text (Fall 1986): 65-88.

(9.) See Chielozona Eze, "Resentment and the African Condition: An Inquiry." 2 GEFAME, Journal of African Studies 1 (2005).

(10.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Maudemarie Clark & Alain J. Swensen, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1988), xxix. Henceforth cited as Genealogy.

(11.) The French etymology: sentir, to feel

(12.) See Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1988).

(13.) See Max Scheler, Ressentiment, W. Holdheim, trans., L. Coser, ed. (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 39-40. Henceforth cited as Ressentiment.

(14.) I do not mean to simplify or caricature theories of cultural relativism. It is well known, and an anonymous reviewer emphasized this to me, that cultural relativism "can also be the product of hegemonist posturing and of the demarcation and disciplining of knowledge." Cultural relativism in Africanist discourse should not therefore be under-stood only as a reactionary response to the historical extravagant universalist claims of an aggressive cultural Eurocentrism (usually exported through the Christian missions) or, in some cases, Arabocentrism (transported largely by Islamicism). Thus, critical relativism could legitimately emerge from within a dominant Western/Christian or Arab/ Islamic society as from within a "weak" African society. In this article, however, I am concerned with examining the relativity inherent in some responses that, as has been pointed out by many, appears to hinder critical political and social discourse in Africa.

(15.) Elizabeth M. Zechenter, "In the Name of Culture: Cultural Relativism and the Abuse of the Individual," 53 Journal of Anthropological Research 3 (1997): 319-47. Henceforth cited as Culture.