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Uses of African Antiquity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

by Jorge Serrano (Author)
©2018 Monographs XIV, 226 Pages
Series: Society and Politics in Africa, Volume 26

Summary

African antiquity has been discerned both nullifyingly and constructively. Uses of African Antiquity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries reveals how reading the past can be extended to understand sensitivities involving origins and how it imparts collective posture. The ancient historical imagery epitomized by writers and artists alike includes the distant past as well as an immediate past. Comparatively, representation of time long gone records transhistorical presence and civilizational participation and agentic validity. African antiquity can be construed as diasporic through time and space and in regards to nomenclature it extends understanding of peopleness, e.g. Libya, Ethiopia, Africa, Afrika, African Egypt, Kemet, Alkebu-lan, Nubia, Ta-Seti, Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Merry, Kush, Axum, Meroë, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Zulu, and so many more are recognized in a time-spatial continuum linked to African, Colored, Negro, and Black, as various terms inform origins identity. Unfortunately, typologies disciplinarily stem from anthropological construction, yet here African antiquity as sign heralds clines and clusters; splintering Africana from humanitas ultimately contends against subjugation. African antiquity absorbs character and notions of diachronologically dispersed peoples reflect origins indulgence. African antiquity as a stretched concept and/or historicism triply adds understanding, grouping, and alterity. This primarily is a review of thinkers who defend against people erasure in the past with its socially and nihilistic affective ways.

Table Of Contents


Jorge Serrano

Uses of African Antiquity
in the Twentieth and
Twenty-First Centuries

About the author

Jorge Serrano is Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware. He has taught at the University of Tennessee and Virginia Commonwealth University. Serrano is a graduate of Columbia, Yale, and Temple universities, where he majored in classics, archaeology, and African American studies, respectively.

About the book

African antiquity has been discerned both nullifyingly and constructively. Uses of African Antiquity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries reveals how reading the past can be extended to understand sensitivities involving origins and how it imparts collective posture. The ancient historical imagery epitomized by writers and artists alike includes the distant past as well as an immediate past. Comparatively, representation of time long gone records transhistorical presence and civilizational participation and agentic validity. African antiquity can be construed as diasporic through time and space, and in regards to nomenclature, it extends understanding of peopleness, e.g. Libya, Ethiopia, Africa, Afrika, African Egypt, Kemet, Alkebu-lan, Nubia, Ta-Seti, Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Merry, Kush, Axum, Meroë, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Zulu, and so many more are recognized in a time-spatial continuum linked to African, Colored, Negro, and Black, as various terms inform origins identity. Unfortunately, typologies disciplinarily stem from anthropological construction, yet here African antiquity as sign heralds clines and clusters; splintering Africana from humanitas ultimately contends against subjugation. African antiquity absorbs character, and notions of diachronologically dispersed peoples reflect origins indulgence. African antiquity as a stretched concept and/or historicism triply adds understanding, grouping, and alterity. This primarily is a review of thinkers who defend against people erasure in the past with its socially and nihilistic affective ways.

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Preface

As an aspiring transdisciplinary scholar, I voraciously work at learning about origins and identity; or primarily how the past has been perceived by people. This endeavoring not only led me to look at history but also involved classical, Egyptological, anthropological, and literary fields of study in the broadest sense. This work interprets writings as purposeful artistry and artifact that manifest social formations. My training began long ago informally as a lover of books and as a young aspiring mind and formally in an academic setting with Classics as I became thoroughly immersed in understanding the beginnings of civilization which I now consider a vague concept. While reading various Western ancient authors both in the original and in translation, I never lost sight of my primary concern for keenly delving into the idea of heritage and my place within it that developed throughout what can be considered Lehrjahre.

Consequentially, I read books then and now and here and there forever attempting to find myself somewhere. My research was fueled by picking up and reading peripheral books on street corner and permissible books in well-­lighted libraries, both of which helped establish←xi | xii→ a vital interconnectivity that inevitably propelled me to Elysian fields of study. Critically, I marked references by ancient and modern writers and their notions about tradition identity that reflected to me their understanding of their own utilitarian past. I made note of modern and ancient writers reverent attention to far and distant lands, that is, lands outside of the Greek and Roman realms in the case of European antiquity, and considered to me to mean an African antiquity, and respectively I took account of what I now trace as specified social and ancestral constructs about perceptions of civilizational anteriority particularly presented and involved by various writers who not only reconstruct an obtainable past but also regard vindicating a slighted self. As I continued to read, I noted that antiquity and modernity really sit side by side, that is, the many intersubjectivity aspects of African antiquity, both in the past and present; it is always fluid and malleable.

While reviewing selected aspects of African antiquity or heritage interaction, I discovered that early civilizations entailed a consistent multicultural process (which I consider to be fundamental and a diachronic activity); an extracultural bauplan intertwines the twentieth century and ultimately today and humanitas Africana. I discovered an idea about how we came to stand where we are as Paul Robeson once biographically proclaimed, Here I Stand. Hence, this work offers affective transcultural undertaking. It reveals how we regard the concept African antiquity and each other despite being distantly apart and despite one being deemed “of African descent” and still enduring ancient invisibility and from a North American perspective still seeing only the prominence of learning of enslavement, peonage, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. One would think that learning about such horrors would end the reenslavement and present-­day mass incarceration and police brutality. I learned that there are multiple and emotive pasts and that, for me, at most times, the correct kind of past can help a people preserve innumerable social injustices.

As an aspiring mind nestled in the bosom of Columbia University on the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall, I also came to realize something about the past and my connection to it. I peered into legacy reconstruction deeply desperately seeking African antiquity, myself really, though←xii | xiii→ regarding the Greeks and the Roman at first and then further back with African Egypt. Ultimately and heuristically, humanitas Africana resided in the only place possible, Temple University. This book is more an autodidactic exercise that precipitated from exposure to various University Halls which helped to facilitate the return.←xiii | xiv→ ←xiv | 1→

Details

Pages
XIV, 226
Year
2018
ISBN (PDF)
9781433140853
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433140860
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433140877
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433140846
DOI
10.3726/b10806
Language
English
Publication date
2018 (January)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2018. XIV, 226 pp.

Biographical notes

Jorge Serrano (Author)

Jorge Serrano is Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware. He has taught at the University of Tennessee and Virginia Commonwealth University. Serrano is a graduate of Columbia, Yale, and Temple universities, where he majored in classics, archaeology, and African American studies, respectively.

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Title: Uses of African Antiquity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
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