oh god.
the olmec head thing has returned…
Yeah…this was always shady reasoning to me. I mean, I am all about seeing evidence that Africans traveled to the Americas long before white Europeans. And there’s definitely not enough scholarship done on the cultural exchange between Amerindians and Black folks even during or after the transatlantic slave trade. But saying Olmec statues are modeled after Black Africans because they have Black features is…just shady logic. Humanity came from Africa so these phenotypes happen everywhere. The world looks like Africa and Africa looks like the world.
Idk, I think They Came Before Colombus is a weird book and there’s a lot of stuff to unpack re: how and why it was written, the ways in which people react to it, and the author himself, Ivan Van Sertima. Who, a quick google search tells me, is Guyanese and didn’t move to the USA until adulthood for graduate work.
And, as a descendant of US Freedmen, I’m wondering what life was like for him in Guyana and what erasure of Black-Amerindian cultures he experienced. Cuz, if it’s anything like what Natives have done in the US to erase that Black people were ever a part of them…I can kind of see how a person might feel like, “Fuck you! All your shit is Black, now what?”
Agreed! My thoughts are that Mesoamerican peoples were entirely responsible for the creation of their own urban landscapes, their own artwork, their own writing system, etc… Anyway, I would encourage all to read this article before before taking the ‘came before columbus’ theory seriously:
Word on the discussion of African-Mesoamerican stuff.
On the subject of Guyana, one of my friends is of Guyanese heritage, and his grandfather was actually heavily involved in politics there. From the stories he’s shared, the racial dynamics are really complicated. I mean, they are everywhere, but they’re rather different compared to the rest of Latin America. The population is split about equally between Guyanese people of East Indian descent and those of African descent, and there’s apparently Great Enmity between these two groups, which dominate the political sphere. Meanwhile, about 10% of the population is indigenous and is largely ignored and stigmatized by the rest of the country.
I’m not entirely sure what this means for Ivan van Sertima, but it certainly places his writing in a very interesting context.
(via biencafre)
