How to counter racism? Sooth with a cool application of philosophical knowledge or inflame with the immediacy of emotional energy? Classicist Ellen Cole Lee’s abstract for her paper at the upcoming Theorizing Africana Receptions workshop (details here) on anger in the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca and the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde sets out the options in stark terms, with the Stoic resisting the rush of rage in favor of his individualized faculty of reason and the activist harnessing the emotion for social change for her community.
Let us, for a moment, replace Seneca with the New York-based Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne. In an interview for the education issue (‘Curriculum of Connections’) of the magazine C& called ‘Trump Troubles’, Diagne reacts to the interviewer’s question about the US president’s immigration policies in the following way:
The situation you describe doesn’t affect me personally in my own life, but I do have to have responsibility for the Senegalese community living here…The community is very troubled by the measures that have been taken. The press has reported widely on the recent deportation of fellow Senegalese citizens.
The conversation then transitions to the Pan-African movement, specifically its Francophone perspective, and the process of the decolonization of thought. Here Diagne turns to the history of philosophy and its transmission – allow me to quote the passage in full:
For years, textbooks have taught that philosophy began in Greece with the Greek Miracle, moved to [Roman] Antiquity, to Medieval writers in Latin, and then into the modern and contemporary era. This made philosophy into something uniquely and strictly European. To decolonize the history of philosophy, we must restore complexity to that history. Ultimately, the transmission of philosophical knowledge was not strictly linear or unilateral from Athens to Rome and from Rome to the Latin, Christian West. The story of philosophy is also the passage of Greek philosophy and knowledge to Baghdad, to Fez, to Timbuktu, etc. Greek science and philosophy took many roundabout journeys and detours that need to be explained. Philosophy today is plural in people’s thinking around the world.
With Diagne’s decolonized history of philosophical transmission and translation in mind, let us return to Ellen Cole Lee’s abstract. Having established the different responses to anger in Seneca and Lorde, she transposes them onto the field of Classical Reception Studies, whereby Seneca’s model would entail a hierarchical and individualized correspondence between the receiving post-Classical author or artist and the received ancient Greek or Roman source, and Lorde’s would advocate for the plurality and network of correspondences in order to break down systems of racist oppression on behalf of a whole community. Is Lorde’s use of anger here closer aligned to Diagne’s decolonized story of philosophy, its detours and plurality, in short, its gaining of complexity by breaking the racism of a linear translation of the Eurocentric narrative?
In ‘Exile’, a chapter from his book African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, reproduced in The documenta 14 Reader, Diagne turns to the 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue française, edited by the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor and published with the preface ‘Black Orpheus’ by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. As Diagne points out, Satre’s argument about Négritude is that it is a subjective movement, a turn to the self. However, Diagne turns to Senghor’s inclusion and presentation his fellow Senegalese poet and griot, Birago Diop as a way of countering this argument grounded in subjectivity. While Sartre singles Diop out as unlike the other poets in the collection, is merely drawing ‘gripping effects from simple translation’ of folktales and stories, Senghor reveals how it is a trick of the griot to construct new poetic effects out of old themes. In short, there is something beyond the Eurocentric dichotomy of emotion and translation in Diop’s words.
This post has been accompanied by images of the two performances by Dancer and choreographer Kettly Noël, Zombification performed in Athens and Errance in Kassel (both of which you can watch clips of in the above videos). Noël was born in Port au Prince in Haiti but pursued her career in Africa, first in Benin, training later members the Benin National Ballet, and then in Mali where she founded a dance festival in Bamako. Her work offers another way to negotiate the choice of emotion or translation, individual and community, not only in terms of the obvious differences between the solo work in Kassel and the group action in Athens, but also in terms of how she describes what happens when she performs. In an interview with the documenta 14 education team, accompanied by a translator (it is worth watching the video just for their dynamic!), Noël explains that in a performance:
The spirit, the body, the emotion, even your blood, your body and your soul come together, that is what you transmit to yourself and your audience, and a truth appears by itself
So, to the question for the Eos workshop (which differs somewhat from my previous ones): while you are delivering your papers at the workshop on Africana receptions, will you also register the process of transmission between you and your audience? Will you try to read their faces for signs of some emotion? (When you watch the Errance video above, look to the faces of the white German women as they watch and become part of the performance!). As for the readers of C&: is there a way beyond an emotional response to the racism of Eurocentric claims of a linear philosophical transmission? And for us all, less a question and more of a note of appreciation for all of the living translators who connect living people with ideas and emotions, be they ancient or contemporary.