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Abstract
This essay threads together Bernth Lindfors’ contributions to African literary studies, Dennis Brutus’s career as an activist poet, and the political positions of the African Literature Association on academic and cultural boycott. The analysis of this history brings into focus the way that the institutions of African literary studies in the US from their early formation in the 1970s until the present have paradoxically reproduced the often limiting norms of literary scholarship and at the same time challenged the convention of political neutrality that is a feature of scholarly associations. Metropolitan African studies in general, like other area studies fields, have been troubled by the paradox of competing principles: on the one hand, the principle of political neutrality and non-interference; and on the other hand, the principle of social responsibility, derived in large part from the influential conceptualization of engagement in the 1960s. Lindfors, Brutus, and the other founding members of the African Literature Association gave expression to this paradox to one degree or another, but it was notably on the question of the cultural boycott of South Africa that the competing principles became the most intensely polarizing.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Houser was an American anti-war, anti-racist, anti-apartheid organizer, who in 1940 was imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft and in 1942 helped to establish the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He was the executive director of ACOA from 1955 to 1981.
2 In 1968 South Africa banned the UCLA African Studies Center journal, African Arts/Arts de’Afrique for publishing the writings of restricted South Africans living in exile, including Dennis Brutus poems (“South Africa Bans” 11), which reveals how poetry and politics were intertwined in the life and work of Brutus.
3 Lindfors also attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, which was the second occasion when he and Brutus met (“Introduction,” The Dennis Brutus Tapes, 2).
4 At the time, The Benin Review was edited by Abiola lrele and Pius Oleghe; the Associate Editors were Ime Ikiddeh, Dan Izevbaye, Kalu Uka, and the Corresponding Editors were (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite, Charles Davies, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Lewis Nkosi.
5 The conference included a panel titled “Literature and Commitment in South Africa” with presentations by Keorapetse Kgositsile, Dennis Brutus, Chinua Achebe, and Ali Mazrui.
6 In the original version of this paper presented at the 2019 ALA Conference in Columbus, I discuss the connection between Harlow and Lindfors in more detail. Their office doors faced each in the corridor of Calhoun Hall. I took classes with both of them; Harlow was my dissertation advisor, and Lindfors was the most careful editor on my committee. At the level of temperament, academic formation, and critical approach, it is not possible to think of two more unalike scholars, but they shared a commitment to African and Third World literary studies. Harlow died in 2017 and it is hard not to see “Dennis Brutus in the Dock” as a tribute to Lindfors’s deceased UT colleague.
7 After a year-long campaign organized by the Southern Africa Liberation Committee based in East Lansing, Michigan, the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University adopted in 1978 a resolution to divest from South Africa related investments. Michigan State University was the first campus to undertake divestment from South Africa. For account of the anti-apartheid campaign at Michigan State University, see the chapter 5 of Janice Love’s The U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement: Local Activism in Global Politics.
8 I note here that in contrast to my sense of less debate over this issue, one of the anonymous reviewers for the article stated that though the resolution passed, “it was a contentious discussion both at the annual business meeting and in subsequent meetings of the Executive Council. There were arguments about the process/procedure for proposing the resolution not having been followed, and heated arguments about the resolution itself.”
9 Interestingly, Issue published a “Statement: Jewish and Africanist” in Winter 1975 and “Response: Statement. Africanist and Jewish” in Spring 1976, which debated the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 (with 32 abstentions), “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Recall as discussed in the body of this essay that the Spring 1976 number of Issue was dedicated to “Proceedings of the Symposium on Contemporary African Literature and First African Literature Association Conference” edited by Bernth Lindfors. Richard L. Sklar and Michael F. Lofchie wrote the Statement in opposition to the UNGA Resolution, and Richard Lobban wrote the Response critiquing them. Lobban defends the decision of “African statesmen and their colleagues from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, in reaching the overwhelming majority opinion that Zionism is a form of racism,” and criticizes Sklar and Lofchie for not commenting on “the close and intensifying links between Israel and South Africa, the only country in the entire continent which maintains diplomatic relations with Israel.” He also refers to “Israeli arms sales, and trade agreements for diamonds and gold, and international finance which South Africa and Israel use in mutual defense” (63).
10 In 2006, Jimmy Carter published a book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, making a more explicit connection between Israel’s racial policies toward Palestinians and apartheid-era laws of South Africa. And more recently on January 2021, B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization published a paper on its website titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”
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Salah D. Hassan
Salah Hassan is Associate Professor in English and core faculty in the Muslim Studies Program and in Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. His areas of research and teaching include postcolonial literature and theory, mid-twentieth-century anti-colonial intellectual movements, literatures of empire, and Arab and Muslim North American Studies. He co-produced the short documentary film Death of an Imam and is currently producing a series of documentary films on Muslims in the US. He has published widely in his field and is editor of Biography Special Issue: Baleful Postcoloniality 36.1 (2013).