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http://www.ted.com Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. ...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) is an acclaimed Nigerian writer. She is a native of Abba, Nigeria, in Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra state, Southeast Nigeria. Her family is of Igbo descent.[1]Born in the town of Enugu but grew up in the university town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated. While she was growing up, her father was a professor of statistics at the University, and her mother was also employed there as the university registrar.
At the age of 19, she left Nigeria and moved to the United States. After studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Chimamanda transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister; who had a medical practice in Coventry (now in Mansfield, Connecticut), and to continue studying communications and political science.
She received a university degree from Eastern, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001. In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In 2008, she received a Master of Arts in African studies at Yale University.[2] Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.[3] She was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, in 2008, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[4]Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Knopf/Anchor in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.[5]Her third book is a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck and was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.[edit]
http://www.ratical.com/many_worlds/6Nations/EoL/chp4.html
4
ENNOBLING `SAVAGES'
Native America in European natural-rights philosophy
Natural freedom is the only object of the polity of thesavages; with this freedom do nature and climate rulealone amongst them. . . . [T]hey maintain their freedomand find abundant nourishment . . . [and are] people wholive without laws, without polic, without religion.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau[1]
European philosophy has been profoundly influenced since 1492 by the values of people found in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws, made use of African, Arab, Persian, East Indian, and Chinese concepts in his discussions of forms of government.[2] During the 'Age of Discovery,' Europe was not only exploring a world new to its people; these people also were opening their eyes to new ways of thinking, as well as helping themselves to material riches. Because of these intellectual imports, the 'old world' also changed. Created of European wish-fulfillment, the image of the 'Noble Savage' was created from the cloth of this imagery, fashioned by European philosophers, and often returned to the lands of its birth. Native societies, especially in America, reminded Europeans of imagined golden worlds known to them only in folk history. Specifically, Jack Forbes had contended that[w]ith the writings of Rousseau, [and] Voltaire . . . we might suggest that the traditional folk democracy of parts of Europe became viable again when merged with the actual knowledge that there were functioning democratic/communalistic societies in the world. [3]
This reawakening of the idea of freedom and modern democratic ideals was born in 'Native American wigwams because it was only in America' that Europeans from 1500 to 1776 knew of societies that were 'truly free.' Forbes asserts this even though he recognizes that American Indian intellectual influences are always denied as a 'cardinal act of faith in European superiority.' In spite of the failure to give credit to Native American people, Forbes states that 'many Europeans reject all or part of the dominant European heritage and have' adopted democratic and environmentalist tendencies.'[4]
As the seventeenth century ended, about 200,000 European colonists lived in widely scattered settlements along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Travel narratives from America were flooding Europe, each with its own mixture of fact and speculation, reality and desire, describing whole new continents that Europeans were seeing for the first time. Shakespeare's plays also were being staged for the first time in England. John Locke had just published his most influential work describing relations between the individual and the state under 'natural law.' From the street, to the stage, to the salon, America was the talk of the day.
In this new environment, the colonists of English North America were influenced by Native American ideas of confederation and democracy. But the story does not end there. The assumption that American democracy evolved from the English parliament or from a perusal of European political thinkers must be tempered with the realization that writers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau derived ideas about democracy in a workable form from travelers' accounts of American Indian governmental structures. American Indian societies were working democracies that drew the attention, and often the admiration, of Europeans from the time of the first contacts.
The way European thinking was shaped by its 'discovery' of the New World (as well as Africa and parts of Asia) also outlines some of its confusing contradictions. From the beginning, the Noble Savage was idealized in philosophy as his real-life counterparts were slaughtered to make way for 'progress.' That people deemed expendable could so profoundly shape European (and colonial American) thinking might be beyond a mind that does not take European assumptions for granted.
The Noble Savage was an apparition of European imagination, of course, but like any racial stereotype, it said as much about the very real drives, perceptions, dreams and desires of its creators as about the newly 'discovered' Americans, themselves. The Noble Savage may have been a creature of imagination, but the influence of the concept on European thought was likewise very real, especially during the Enlightenment years which culminated with the American and French revolutions.
Like most stereotypes, that of the Noble Savage simplified a complex reality. It also created an image that was, paradoxically, both more and less than reality. More, because it ascribed to the natives more life, liberty and happiness than many of them actually possessed, creating a myth which imagined an autonomous wild man of the woods, ignoring the very real social conventions and traditions by which native Americans ordered their lives; less, because the image of the Noble Savage combined many dozens of peoples and belief systems into one generic whole.
And, as with most stereotypes, distance distorted the reality of the image. Thus, the image of the Indian created by Rousseau or Locke seems utterly more fantastical than that of Franklin, Jefferson, and other influential founders of the United States, who did diplomatic business with American native people in the course of their daily lives. These days, the Noble Savage is usually dismissed merely as a figment of imagination, ignoring the power the image held in the Enlightenment mind, and the impact of its appeal to influential thinkers of the time. What we, in the late twentieth century, take as reality mattered not one whit to John Locke or Benjamin Franklin. They saw with their own eyes, not ours.
Europeans came to America, in reality or only in imagination, seeking degrees of material well-being ranging from subsistence to extravagance -- and more intangible benefits, most having to do with some incantation of freedom. Conveniently, and perhaps not surprisingly, the immigrants found America, and its native peoples, rich in both. It also found opposition to its taking, of course, and so the image of the Noble Savage (like most stereotypes) also engendered its opposite, the 'bad Indian,' who stood in the way of the Europeans' destruction of the naturalness its philosophers so admired. They built churches in a place that was described to them as the Garden of Eden.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg
At the age of 19, she left Nigeria and moved to the United States. After studying at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Chimamanda transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister; who had a medical practice in Coventry (now in Mansfield, Connecticut), and to continue studying communications and political science.
She received a university degree from Eastern, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2001. In 2003, she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In 2008, she received a Master of Arts in African studies at Yale University.[2] Chimamanda is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.[3] She was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, in 2008, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[4]Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and won the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived Biafran nation, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published by Knopf/Anchor in 2006 and was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.[5]Her third book is a collection of short stories titled The Thing Around Your Neck and was published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and Knopf in the US.[edit]
http://www.ratical.com/man
4
ENNOBLING `SAVAGES'
Native America in European natural-rights philosophy
Natural freedom is the only object of the polity of thesavages; with this freedom do nature and climate rulealone amongst them. . . . [T]hey maintain their freedomand find abundant nourishment . . . [and are] people wholive without laws, without polic, without religion.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau[1]
European philosophy has been profoundly influenced since 1492 by the values of people found in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws, made use of African, Arab, Persian, East Indian, and Chinese concepts in his discussions of forms of government.[2] During the 'Age of Discovery,' Europe was not only exploring a world new to its people; these people also were opening their eyes to new ways of thinking, as well as helping themselves to material riches. Because of these intellectual imports, the 'old world' also changed. Created of European wish-fulfillment, the image of the 'Noble Savage' was created from the cloth of this imagery, fashioned by European philosophers, and often returned to the lands of its birth. Native societies, especially in America, reminded Europeans of imagined golden worlds known to them only in folk history. Specifically, Jack Forbes had contended that[w]ith the writings of Rousseau, [and] Voltaire . . . we might suggest that the traditional folk democracy of parts of Europe became viable again when merged with the actual knowledge that there were functioning democratic/communalistic societies in the world. [3]
This reawakening of the idea of freedom and modern democratic ideals was born in 'Native American wigwams because it was only in America' that Europeans from 1500 to 1776 knew of societies that were 'truly free.' Forbes asserts this even though he recognizes that American Indian intellectual influences are always denied as a 'cardinal act of faith in European superiority.' In spite of the failure to give credit to Native American people, Forbes states that 'many Europeans reject all or part of the dominant European heritage and have' adopted democratic and environmentalist tendencies.'[4]
As the seventeenth century ended, about 200,000 European colonists lived in widely scattered settlements along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Travel narratives from America were flooding Europe, each with its own mixture of fact and speculation, reality and desire, describing whole new continents that Europeans were seeing for the first time. Shakespeare's plays also were being staged for the first time in England. John Locke had just published his most influential work describing relations between the individual and the state under 'natural law.' From the street, to the stage, to the salon, America was the talk of the day.
In this new environment, the colonists of English North America were influenced by Native American ideas of confederation and democracy. But the story does not end there. The assumption that American democracy evolved from the English parliament or from a perusal of European political thinkers must be tempered with the realization that writers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau derived ideas about democracy in a workable form from travelers' accounts of American Indian governmental structures. American Indian societies were working democracies that drew the attention, and often the admiration, of Europeans from the time of the first contacts.
The way European thinking was shaped by its 'discovery' of the New World (as well as Africa and parts of Asia) also outlines some of its confusing contradictions. From the beginning, the Noble Savage was idealized in philosophy as his real-life counterparts were slaughtered to make way for 'progress.' That people deemed expendable could so profoundly shape European (and colonial American) thinking might be beyond a mind that does not take European assumptions for granted.
The Noble Savage was an apparition of European imagination, of course, but like any racial stereotype, it said as much about the very real drives, perceptions, dreams and desires of its creators as about the newly 'discovered' Americans, themselves. The Noble Savage may have been a creature of imagination, but the influence of the concept on European thought was likewise very real, especially during the Enlightenment years which culminated with the American and French revolutions.
Like most stereotypes, that of the Noble Savage simplified a complex reality. It also created an image that was, paradoxically, both more and less than reality. More, because it ascribed to the natives more life, liberty and happiness than many of them actually possessed, creating a myth which imagined an autonomous wild man of the woods, ignoring the very real social conventions and traditions by which native Americans ordered their lives; less, because the image of the Noble Savage combined many dozens of peoples and belief systems into one generic whole.
And, as with most stereotypes, distance distorted the reality of the image. Thus, the image of the Indian created by Rousseau or Locke seems utterly more fantastical than that of Franklin, Jefferson, and other influential founders of the United States, who did diplomatic business with American native people in the course of their daily lives. These days, the Noble Savage is usually dismissed merely as a figment of imagination, ignoring the power the image held in the Enlightenment mind, and the impact of its appeal to influential thinkers of the time. What we, in the late twentieth century, take as reality mattered not one whit to John Locke or Benjamin Franklin. They saw with their own eyes, not ours.
Europeans came to America, in reality or only in imagination, seeking degrees of material well-being ranging from subsistence to extravagance -- and more intangible benefits, most having to do with some incantation of freedom. Conveniently, and perhaps not surprisingly, the immigrants found America, and its native peoples, rich in both. It also found opposition to its taking, of course, and so the image of the Noble Savage (like most stereotypes) also engendered its opposite, the 'bad Indian,' who stood in the way of the Europeans' destruction of the naturalness its philosophers so admired. They built churches in a place that was described to them as the Garden of Eden.
http://www.youtube.com/wat
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