中間考査の問題を作成しなければいけないのに、この学者のことを調べたくなって、インターネットの細かい蟹文字を見すぎて目が痛い。
まだ若い。そして過激である。それもそのはず、ブラックパンサーの影響から出発した人である。ハーバードを卒業して、そこで教えていたが、学長と喧嘩をして、プリンストンに移った。エールなどでも教えた、というから学者としては、生え抜きの人であろう。自らのrap albumも出している。面白いことに03年に映画“The Matrix Reloaded”にも出演している。
奥さんはエチオピアの人で、彼は毎年に何ヶ月かはエチオピアに滞在するそうだ。この人の次のような見解に興味がある。ただ過激なわけではないのである。これは、あるブログに載っていたもので、このブログの書き手によるインタビューを交えたCornel Westのプロフィールである。
Cornel West also lives two months out of each year in Africa. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, specifically. His wife, Elleni Gebre Amlak, whom he met while teaching at Yale, happens to come from a prominent Ethiopian family.
West says 2,500 people attended their wedding in Addis Ababa. For the Coptic ceremony, West was given an honorary Amharic name: Ficre Selassie, “Spirit of Love.”
“The link between people of African descent here and Ethiopians in my case, but Africans in general, is very important to me,” he says. “For me, it is very different than the imaginary notions of Africa that you often get among Afrocentric folks. Because many – not all, but many – have much more romantic, idealized conceptions of Africa.
“Whereas when I go back home – my second home in Addis Ababa – you’re dealing with just actual human beings. Who do have a rich culture, who do have a grand civilization, but also are involved in tremendous struggles. Against tyrants, against corrupt leadership, against soil erosion, against the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank and a whole host of other forces that impinge upon the life chances of African brothers and sisters on the continent.”
What Prof. West has seen in Ethiopia seems to confirm his analysis of race in America. There, “you have a people never been colonized by Europeans,” he says. “Which means they’ve never had white-supremacist tricks played on their minds. Which means that they’ve never doubted their humanity.
“Which means they’re tremendously self-confident. They just assume that they’re not just human but they’re great, they’re capable of anything.
“For we Africans who have had white-supremacist tricks played on our minds, we got to deal with self-love and self-respect and self-affirmation,” West says softly. “Those are fundamental issues in our lives. Because it’s hard to love oneself in a white-supremacist society. It’s hard to trust one another. But they don’t have those kinds of battles.
こういう人がいる、という備忘録。
日本の記者に対して答える、その柔らかな自在さのような感触が、この記事からもわかるような気がする。
2 件のコメント:
■コーネル・ウェスト。ぼくも、朝日の夕刊で知って以来関心があり、少しづつ調べたりしています。著書の『RACE MATTERS』(2001年第二版）をパラパラ読むと、ユダヤとの関係にも触れていて、面白そうな人です。
たとえば、こんな風です。
Black anti-Semitism and Jewish antiblack racism are real, and both are as profoundly American as cherry pie. There was no golden age in which blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction. Yet there was a better age when the common histories of oppression and degradation of both groups served as a springboard for genuine empathy and principled alliances. Since the late sixties, black-Jewish reletions have reached a nadir.
ありがとうございます。ユダヤ人と黒人との関係というのも、ひとつの大きなテーマなのですね。
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