Comments on: I’m Shocked, Shocked That There’s Hatred Going On Here

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:59:31 +0000

I don't know how much this is true in the African cases, but this valorization of pre-contact culture as the foundation of nationalist discourse represents a flattening of the discourses of nationalism that existed in the early 20th century (or even, extending the discussion to the modern/premodern divide in the West, early 19th century) in which nationalism sometimes means holding on to pre-contamination culture, but also means developing the nation in a modernist direction. There used to be, in other words, a liberal nationalism, which seems like a rare commodity these days.

By: cjlee

cjlee — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:10:12 +0000

This situation highlights for me a political problem faced by many scholars when dealing with the postcolonial period: we don’t always know how to deal with cultural politics that are “conservative” in orientation, or that African “agency” can make a turn for the worst. Is it really surprising that parts of Africa that are highly Christianized would also be homophobic? To me, this doesn’t seem to be the result of recent evangelicalism, but is part of a deeper history of mission influence that has intersected with this recent trend. Scholars have typically celebrated the ways in which African communities employed independent church movements as a means of fighting colonialism, segregation, and so on. These histories fit into a broader set of politics that have been pitched or understood as on the “left”. Yet few have considered or emphasized the cultural conformity of these movements (their hetero-normativity, their patriarchal practices) or others based on nationalism. It seems that only with the emergence of homophobia in Uganda or Zimbabwe, or xenophobia in South Africa, that an awareness develops that this histories are not on the left, or universally progressive, or what have you. This isn’t so much a paradox, as an indication for a need for future work in this area.

By: jfruh

jfruh — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 02:47:48 +0000

For what it’s worth the rhetoric sometimes comes back to the West in interesting ways: my wife does diversity trainings for various state agencies and occasionally there will be African-American participants very resistent to material on gay people, taking the line that homosexuality did not exist in “Ancient Africa.” The “Ancient Africa” forumulation is in fact almost always used, which makes me wonder if there’s actually one source for it, because it’s such an odd turn of phrase to me.