| Brian Holmes on Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:49:35 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> So what does awakening mean to you? |
I'm curious what you'll make of Get Out. The US right now is a very complicated psychodrama, gripping when you're in it, probably quite inscrutable from the outside.
good luck and finish that book about 2100! Brian On 12/30/2017 06:01 AM, Keith Hart wrote:
Hi Brian,Afro-pessimism has had its vogue in Africa too, especially in the decades around the millennium. Its protagonists are still around, but less blatant than before, not least in France. Stephen Smith won the Prix essai 2004 France Televisions for Negrologie: pourquoi l'Afrique meurt (why Africa is dying). Negrologie is a pun on necrologie (obituaries). Macron puts the lie to this when he said recently that France would not deal with African countries whose women have six children on average. 51% of the population is under 20 years old. You think they have heard of Afro-pessimism? In 1900 Europe had a quarter of the world's population despite mass emigration, Africa 7.5%. In 2100 the forecast is that Africans will have 40% of the world's population (now 15%), Asia 42% (now 60%), Europe 6%. The Asian manufacturers are already preparing for the time soon when Africans will constitute the most buoyant sector of world market demand. The West is in denial about its own inevitable decline, beginning with Europe, and white racism grows accordingly.It is not a question of forgetting our humanity.Humanity is the sum of all human beings who have lived, live and will live; a quality of kindness accorded to people of our own kind ("kin"); and a project of becoming individually and collectively human that has barely begun, thanks in large part to the world society that the West made and still seeks to control. Being human isn't a lost paradise, but a prize we need to figure out how to get. With that in mind, I have co-direct a Human Economy Programme in South Africa for seven years so far. We have produced six books whose titles include Human Economy: A Citizen's Guide; Economy For and Against Democracy; Money in a Human Economy.I first heard about Get Out last year when my American liberal academic friends considered it a must see. I checked it out on imdb.com <http://imdb.com> and decided it was not for me. I already had y bellyful of Afro-pessimism and have been writing a book against it for more than a decade, Africa 2100: A History of the Future. Your short review reminds me that I ought to see it. At least I can buy the DVD now. If ideas about becoming human need some work, nothing dissuades me from my long-held belief that culture is a deeply reactionary concept whose twin parents (the early modern European courts and German xenophobic nationalism) encourage inhumanity as the product of an inescapable dead hand on its bearers. In South Africa and elsewhere, culture has succeeded race as the universal excuse for not adhering to the law or even to basic humanism. Read Breidenbach and Nyiri Seeing culture everywhere; from genocide to consumer habits (2009).When I landed in an Accra slum at 22, I knew that if I succumbed to the prevailing cultural stereotypes -- I was white, rich, educated, powerful; they were black, poor, illiterate and largely powerless -- my research would be dead and maybe me with it. We gradually built two-way social relations based on human exchange in the widest sense. I desperately needed what they had in abundance: human warmth, eating and drinking together, playing their games badly. There were lots of mistakes, especially on my part, but I lived there for over two years. I came to believe that all social relations start from unequal premises from some perspectives, of which parent-child is the prototype, but we have it in us to try to make them more equal. That is what becoming human means to me.KOn Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:09 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com <mailto:bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>> wrote:"You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall?" With these questions, director Jordan Peele asks *you* to explain the real horror of his box-office sensation, "Get Out." capitalist democracies, staring into screens as the climate changes. "Get Out" - like all Afro-Pessimism - is about the impossibility of reforming the cultures of domination. And so awakening is no seduction, but it does mean embracing the fall of Empire. Or that's how my sliver-of-self sees it. Horror as a call to counter-culture. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l <http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org <mailto:nettime@kein.org> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: --<http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=email_sig&utm_campaign=gmail_api&utm_content=thumb>Keith Hartkeith-hart.com <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=email_sig&utm_campaign=gmail_api&utm_content=thumb>
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