for
The meeting will be held at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel,
January 19 - 21, 1998
In Africa, qualities of thought (and of mind) are widely characterized in terms of temperature: coolness is considered positive, while anything hot is to be avoided.(1) While African Americans regarded being cool as a virtue, the diaspora was not "cool- country" (at peace), and it was often difficult for the enslaved to maintain "cool hearts" (collectedness of mind).(2) African-American thought was often "more than cool reason."(3) This conference will explore how African identity changed in the diaspora, comparing these processes in the several streams of resettlement where new-old cultures were being "conjured."(4)
Studies of the enslaved in the New World undertaken over the last thirty years now make it possible to address salient issues regarding black worldviews and identity during the period that began in the mid- sixteenth century. The significant work that has been done on the African cultures from which slaves came reemphasizes change over time in traditional societies.(5) Art, music, and dance historians have moved across the Atlantic and back, exploring connections and delineating changes in these expressions of culture.(6) Analysts of early black diaspora religious behavior and thought have constructed paradigms that suggest both continuity and significant renewal.(7) The radical transformations of the period encompassing the American, French, and Haitian revolutions significantly affected the thought and actions of black people and were also affected by them, slavery being the central idiom for discussion of morality, self, and power.(8) In the post-revolutionary decades, these transformative ideas and values were more widely expressed in black diaspora cultural activities, including slave rebellions, as well as in published writings. It can now be proposed that as Africans were enslaved, exiled, and resettled, new systems of thought emerged as new regional identities were constructed. These can be found in the narratives of Africans and Afro-Americans and in their behavior, ranging from styles of dance to patterns of resistance.
The conference "More than Cool Reason" will focus on changes in blacks' perceptions of self and others, including their understanding of race, Africa, and America; their emergent attitudes to slavery as a system, their own enslavement, and accommodation with it or rebellion; and overall, their conceptions of their past and their future.
Four themes have been selected to structure presentation and discussion:
An invitation is also extended to Middle Eastern scholars dealing with slavery in the eastern regions to participate in the final session and discuss contrasts and comparisons with the development of the thought of the enslaved in that area. Interested persons should contact Professor Mechal Sobel, Department of History, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, ISRAEL; telephone 011 - 972 - 4- 373618; FAX 011 - 972 - 4 - 342101; e-mail RHHG204@UVM.HAIFA.AC.IL.
Mechal Sobel, University of Haifa, Program Chair
ENDNOTES:
1. Robert F. Thompson has collected such usages from 35 West African languages, ("from Wolof to Zulu") and finds that the term for cool is used to refer to or seen as equivalent to, "calm, beauty, tranquility of mind, peace, verdancy, reconciliation, social purification, purification of the self, moderation of strength, gentleness, healing, softness . . . silence, discretion, wetness, rawness, newness, greenness, proximity to the gods," in African Art in Motion (Berkeley, 1974), 43. In the West, and especially in the English language, qualities of thought (and mind) are generally described in visual terminology, such as clear, bright, and brilliant or fuzzy and obscure. See Julian Janes, "Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind," Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (1986), 132.
2. As early as 1801 an enslaved cook on a Virginia plantation defended a white man as "a good cool-massa." See John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America during 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802 (New York, 1909), 372.
3. Shakespeare used a such a phrase in 1590 in A Midsummer's Night Dream: "A man of understanding is of an excellent [marg. coole] spirit." A 1611 Bible noted that an excellent spirit is a "coole spirit." It is possible that these usages were influenced by those of Africans in England.
4. Thoephus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York, 1994), 254. Ivan Karp reminds us that Africans held "many different attitudes toward life and different ideals about the possibility of action," in his "Preface" to Karp and Charles S. Bird, eds., Explorations of African Systems of Thought (Washington, D.C. [1980], 1987), xvi.
5. For a representative sampling of such studies, see Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, Wis., 1990); Sally Falk Moore, "Changing Perspectives on a Changing Africa: The Work of Anthropology," in R. H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and J. O'Barr, Africa and the Disciplines (Chicago, 1993), 3 - 57; Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900 - 1991 (Millwood, N.Y., 1993); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730 - 1830 (Madison, Wis., 1988), 3 - 379; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (New York, 1992); Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago, 1986); Richard Price, First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore, 1983); and Michael Mullin, Africa in America (Urbana, 1992).
6. Two important examples are Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1983), and John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts (Cleveland, 1978).
7. Among the many important works in the area are Lawrence Levine, Black Culture/Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1978); Margaret Washington Creel, "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community Culture among the Gullahs (New York, 1988); and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture (New York, 1987).
8. Eric Foner, "The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation," Journal of American History, 81 (1994), 435 - 460; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wis., 1990); and Julius Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution," Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986.