Homestead, Homeland, Home
- This is a collection of observations and meditations by Professor Emeritus (York University, Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events, issues, people and ideas culled from recent history and the world, from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries, it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home, no place, that is to say, which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are, therefore, harsh, particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation, in his view, has, in recent history, made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared, certainly not the author’s native land, Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher’s searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode, resounding with intermittent fury, to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.
Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. It is no exaggeration to affirm that he is one of the most innovative contemporary dialectical thinkers This book bears eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and also to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice. Deeply anchored in African cultures and modes of life, Sekyi-Otu has shown how ideas of human universality are ingrained in African popular sayings and proverbs and are regularly reflected in artistic creations. He writes:
“I said I discovered my blackness at Harvard and the USA. That’s because at Mfantsipim School I was not a Black student but simply a student a-racial. Back in Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, in a kind of return of the a-racial and re-acquaintance with the ordinary, I would not be a Black professor but a professor. Of course, there is no such thing as a ‘professor’ unmodified. There are, and there will always be, other prefixes, be they of defining or ancillary significance. But it would not be a Black professor. That’s because there I am not primarily a racialized subject, not Black. … In Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, unless I applied some serious bleaching agents, the fact of my black skin will remain unchanged. But the specific gravity of the lived experience of blackness will be registered otherwise. True, from the lovely landscape of that university, the metaphysics, politics, economics and culture of white supremacy as a world system will not disappear. Neither will the struggle against the persistence of its forms and the necessity of weapons of criticism aimed at these forms end.”
CONTENTS
THE ARGUMENT
1
FORGETTING TO RE-MEMBER
Obama At The Door Of No Return
Tu Quoque Ogua’s Oblivion
II
SONGS OF SANKOFA
The Joseph Project The Year of Return
The Beautiful City
So Are You Going Back to Live There?
III
ONE REASON FOR THE JOURNEY BACK
The Lore of Race
Of Crime and Punishment Sue Bird’s Reprieve
My Brother’s Keeper
Zimmerman Syndrome
Jivani’s Answer and Sartre’s Wager
Variations on Racist Inference
On the Very Talk of Black on Black Crime
Of Crime Without MetaphysicsIV
THE BLACK PROFESSOR’S BURDEN
The Other Dream Deferred
The Pedagogic Bond as Racial Covenant
The Text. Reading as Racial Allegory
Dissertation as Race War
Chimera of Pure Forms?
Or Utopian Realism
Contrapuntal Vibrations
V
HUMAN THINGS, BLACK KINDS?
Serenading Serena
Black Love?
And Black Food?
VI
PROPERTY RITES
Forbidden Appropriation
A Luta Continua
Reductio. Who Owns the Kente
Other Felonies
Ethical Appropriation. Hard Cases
What (Critique of) Identity Politics Is Not
Ethics as Identity Politics?
Black Skin, Differing Worlds? The Gravity of Small Differences
VII
OBSERVATIONS ON USA (NOT IN THE KEY OF THE PANEGYRIC)
Pre-Curses
Hyperbole Nation
Bipartisanship USA
The Big Beam in Your Eye “The American People”
The Liberty of Savages?
Postscript
Masks of Freedom
Infantile Individualism, Juvenile Patriotism
Restrictions: Motive and Consequence
American Justice, Canadian Prism
Henry Kissinger and the Insufferable Exaltation of the Wicked
Milton’s Satan or Nietzsche’s Kant
New Orleans, Old USA
From Katrina to the Pandemic
Malcolm’ Truth
The American Evasion of Inference
“That’s Not Who We Are”: Metaphysics Of/And the Nation
How Not To Insult The Other Americas
Travesties of Proust
How American Exceptionalism Is Made
Alternative Definitions of American Exceptionalism
The Sorry Figure of the American Liberal
Interpretation of Migrants’ Dreams
American Theodicy
Lament for the Nation
Wrong Diagnosis
Mistaken Etiology
USA Before and After Trump
Bolivia’s Revenge The World Après Trump
Right Names Matter
Afghanistan: Auspicious Domino?
What A Wonderful World
VIII
HOMELAND IS NOT YET HOME
Bessie’s Question, Ernst’ Dream
“Take But Degree Away”: Homeland Variations
Of Abdul and Master
Language, Life and Death
Criminal Prudery
Abdication of the Guardians
“No Saviours”
Mind of the Right
The NPP’s Creed and Its Vanguard
Brothers Under the Skin
Property-Owning Democracy
The Metaprocedural Republic
Pray to God or Pray the Court
Sins of the National Cathedral
Raison d’état According to the Party of Reason
Naana: A Political and Personal Celebration
Postscript: The Pitfalls of Praising the Living
Trickledown Predation
Enlightenment’s Avatars
“Prehistory in a Tailcoat”
Two Concepts of Hope
“Perpetual Solicitude” and Absolute Faith
The Sacral and the Carceral
Concerning Faith: A Soliloquy
Our Holy Factors
First Principle
Fraudulent Faith and Fatal Folly
Black Lives Matter. What of Ghanaian Human Lives?
Little Kindnesses, “Antagonistic Totality”
Mea Culpa
The Rage and the Grief
Exile’s Reputed Rewards
Homeland’s Burdened Blessings
The Trouble With “Diaspora”
Antiphonies of Homecoming
IX
STRANGE THINGS OF THE WORLD
The Souls of Rightwing Black Folks
Rightwing Blacks’ Notion of Power
John Ridley’s Black Pantheon
Exceptional Blacks and the American Ideology
Lament of an Exceptional Black
Rghtwing Jews: An Autobiography of Sorrow
Ayaan Hirshi Ali
V.S. Naipaul; A Belated Notice
Fareed Zakaria
Dinesh D’Souza
Colours of Anti-Black Racism
Anti-Black Racism’s Kaleidoscope
X
KWARTENG’S TALE
Prologue
Logic of a World
A Meteor’s Constellation
The Fall
Epilogue
XI
PEEVES AND DREAMS AT LARGE
After 9/11: Sophistic Analytics, Treacherous Taxonomies
Eccentric Affinities, Amorphous Antipathies
On First Seeing George Walker Bush Highway in Accra: A Report on Nausea
#Must Fall: Ethics With Borders (Of Time)
Postscript: Family Resemblances in Metaethics
Collective Guilt, Selective Application
Of the Passions of the Devout
Treason of the Putative Left
Other Ethnocultural Cleansers
Solidarity, regardless Verboten: Rerum Cognoscere Causas Cause, Case, Connectedness
Other Rightwing Acts of Grand Larceny Definition of the New Right
Conservatives and History
“Bringing Democracy to Indian Reserves”
Internecine Violence of the Vanquished Some Iconic Names and Sayings of Our Time in Translation
Reform Redefined, Freedom Reframed Towards Truth in Political Economy
Rival Versions of Ethics and Economics
Some Linguistic Gems of Our Time (Nor Intended to be Witticisms)
China Risen. Next?
China Under Surveillance
Two Concepts of Power
What of Putin’s Russia
Testing the Categorical Imperative
The Lure of Misanthropy
Beautiful Bonds
Traitorous Ties
Treacherous Oaths
The Grateful Dead
XII
PERSISTENT POLEMICS, COUNTERVAILING MUSINGS
Two Unpublished Letters to the Editor
Postscript: Still Framing Fanon
Perverse Consistency: The Case of Hannah Arendt Transcultural Curiosities
The Poverty of Monoculturalism
Wrongful Conviction
“Singing Truth”
EPILOGUE
While I Am Still Old Enough To Dream
Customer Reviews
There are no reviews yet.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.