For an African elenchus: colonial and postcolonial misprisions and Classics in Africa
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468468 , vital:77063 , https://doi.org/10.1093/bics/qbac002
- Description: This paper reflects on the god Dionysus in the context of African explorations of the role and meaning of Classical traditions in and for Africa. The problem of decolonization entails the creative challenge to conceive an African modernity, but how we shall recognize what that is to mean remains open. Knowledge as claim and contestation are foregrounded with Dionysus and in his presence. He is a figure who is chronically misprised, so that misprision itself becomes a feature of his experience and meaning. Offering examples of two kinds of popular interpretive stances and arguing that they represent typical but weak readings, the idea is developed that Africa requires elenchus as hermeneutic ideal, an epistemic pessimism and commitment to seeking as it finds its own way. It ought not, from a peripheral position, to adopt or reject the popular and low-yielding misprisions and cultural contestations that obtain in the Western academy and offer little to a flowering African Humanities.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468468 , vital:77063 , https://doi.org/10.1093/bics/qbac002
- Description: This paper reflects on the god Dionysus in the context of African explorations of the role and meaning of Classical traditions in and for Africa. The problem of decolonization entails the creative challenge to conceive an African modernity, but how we shall recognize what that is to mean remains open. Knowledge as claim and contestation are foregrounded with Dionysus and in his presence. He is a figure who is chronically misprised, so that misprision itself becomes a feature of his experience and meaning. Offering examples of two kinds of popular interpretive stances and arguing that they represent typical but weak readings, the idea is developed that Africa requires elenchus as hermeneutic ideal, an epistemic pessimism and commitment to seeking as it finds its own way. It ought not, from a peripheral position, to adopt or reject the popular and low-yielding misprisions and cultural contestations that obtain in the Western academy and offer little to a flowering African Humanities.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
Liberation philology: decolonizing Classics in Africa, a native view from the South
- Van Schoor, David J, Ackah, Kofi, Okyere Asante, Michael K
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J , Ackah, Kofi , Okyere Asante, Michael K
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468479 , vital:77064 , https://doi.org/10.1093/bics/qbac005
- Description: If you were a manumitted slave, the child of a slave or de-scendant of enslaved or dispossessed people or, say, you were a member of your society’s lowest castes and you were given the opportunity to study, and perhaps even to take up scholarship as your life’s work, your vocation, what subject would you, should you elect to learn? William Sanders Scar-borough was born in slavery in the deep South of the United States. His father, Jeremiah, was libertus, a freeman. None-theless, William De Graffenreid, the owner of Scarborough’s mother Frances, magnanimously allowed Jeremiah to marry her, his property. She gave birth to her son in Macon, Geor-gia, in 1852. Scarborough would go on to become one of the first Black Hellenists in the United States. Over a productive life he was a schoolteacher, a professor at Wilberforce Uni-versity in Ohio, an early Black member of the American Philo-logical Association (the first was Richard Greener, his friend and fellow classicist), the first Black member of the Modern Languages Association, the president of Wilberforce, and a founding member of the Negro Academy and of the NAACP.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J , Ackah, Kofi , Okyere Asante, Michael K
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468479 , vital:77064 , https://doi.org/10.1093/bics/qbac005
- Description: If you were a manumitted slave, the child of a slave or de-scendant of enslaved or dispossessed people or, say, you were a member of your society’s lowest castes and you were given the opportunity to study, and perhaps even to take up scholarship as your life’s work, your vocation, what subject would you, should you elect to learn? William Sanders Scar-borough was born in slavery in the deep South of the United States. His father, Jeremiah, was libertus, a freeman. None-theless, William De Graffenreid, the owner of Scarborough’s mother Frances, magnanimously allowed Jeremiah to marry her, his property. She gave birth to her son in Macon, Geor-gia, in 1852. Scarborough would go on to become one of the first Black Hellenists in the United States. Over a productive life he was a schoolteacher, a professor at Wilberforce Uni-versity in Ohio, an early Black member of the American Philo-logical Association (the first was Richard Greener, his friend and fellow classicist), the first Black member of the Modern Languages Association, the president of Wilberforce, and a founding member of the Negro Academy and of the NAACP.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
Wilder than Polyphemus
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468501 , vital:77066 , ISBN 978-1-928502-32-6 , https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.47622/9781928502302_9
- Description: Though Graeco-Roman antiquity (‘classics’) has often been considered the handmaid of colonialism, its various forms have nonetheless endured through many of the continent’s decolonising transitions. Southern Africa is no exception. This book canvasses the variety of forms classics has taken in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and especially South Africa, and even the dynamics of transformation itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468501 , vital:77066 , ISBN 978-1-928502-32-6 , https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.47622/9781928502302_9
- Description: Though Graeco-Roman antiquity (‘classics’) has often been considered the handmaid of colonialism, its various forms have nonetheless endured through many of the continent’s decolonising transitions. Southern Africa is no exception. This book canvasses the variety of forms classics has taken in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and especially South Africa, and even the dynamics of transformation itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
Καὶ καταψεύδου καλῶς: Wagering on divinity in Euripides' Bacchae
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468490 , vital:77065 , https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/323/article/807635/summary
- Description: In the late work of Euripides, a strong contrast is established between belief in divinity characterized by sincere, affective commitment, and belief that is founded on reasoned calculation. This paper studies this contrast, focussing on Bacchae, Euripides' last surviving work. Two recent approaches to the agency of human subjects and their disposition to evaluate are introduced and compared as models. Charles Taylor's contemporary philosophy of ethics, of will and orders of value is briefly outlined and applied to the situation dramatized by the poet. Subsequently, Stuart Guthrie's cognitive science model of the wager on the presence of divine agents as instrumentally advantageous, is also shown to pertain to an attitude discernible in the tragedy of Pentheus and Dionysus at Thebes. In a work of public theatre, one concerning the complex figure of Dionysus, this endorsement of the quality of sincerity as a condition for validity is significant in the course of Greek religiosity. The widely attested shift to increasing individualism in the Athenian fifth century finds striking expression in the definitive emphasis laid on personal feeling and emotional sincerity in dealings with divinity.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468490 , vital:77065 , https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/323/article/807635/summary
- Description: In the late work of Euripides, a strong contrast is established between belief in divinity characterized by sincere, affective commitment, and belief that is founded on reasoned calculation. This paper studies this contrast, focussing on Bacchae, Euripides' last surviving work. Two recent approaches to the agency of human subjects and their disposition to evaluate are introduced and compared as models. Charles Taylor's contemporary philosophy of ethics, of will and orders of value is briefly outlined and applied to the situation dramatized by the poet. Subsequently, Stuart Guthrie's cognitive science model of the wager on the presence of divine agents as instrumentally advantageous, is also shown to pertain to an attitude discernible in the tragedy of Pentheus and Dionysus at Thebes. In a work of public theatre, one concerning the complex figure of Dionysus, this endorsement of the quality of sincerity as a condition for validity is significant in the course of Greek religiosity. The widely attested shift to increasing individualism in the Athenian fifth century finds striking expression in the definitive emphasis laid on personal feeling and emotional sincerity in dealings with divinity.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Eti zōsa phlox
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468457 , vital:77062 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/26945033?seq=1
- Description: Myths of the god typically recount a divine presence undiscerned or misdiagnosed by mortals, with tragic consequences. The vengeful Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae comes amongst humans disguised, ironically, to make them learn and recognise his divine identity and that they are in the presence of the truly, if not at first apparently, immortal. The kind of inference that it seems mortals are expected to rely upon in the vicinity of Dionysus in order to secure that all-important knowledge and recognition, is explored in this paper, which is offered as a contribution towards the development of a contemporary anthropology of Greek tragedy and its god. The anthropology of art and agency of Alfred Gell is mobilised in order to explore how different modes of inference are implicitly compared and evaluated in the drama and to suggest what this has to do with the nature of Dionysiac experience as represented by the tragic poet.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
- Authors: Van Schoor, David J
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468457 , vital:77062 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/26945033?seq=1
- Description: Myths of the god typically recount a divine presence undiscerned or misdiagnosed by mortals, with tragic consequences. The vengeful Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae comes amongst humans disguised, ironically, to make them learn and recognise his divine identity and that they are in the presence of the truly, if not at first apparently, immortal. The kind of inference that it seems mortals are expected to rely upon in the vicinity of Dionysus in order to secure that all-important knowledge and recognition, is explored in this paper, which is offered as a contribution towards the development of a contemporary anthropology of Greek tragedy and its god. The anthropology of art and agency of Alfred Gell is mobilised in order to explore how different modes of inference are implicitly compared and evaluated in the drama and to suggest what this has to do with the nature of Dionysiac experience as represented by the tragic poet.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
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