Latin America Today
Academy Out of Time: Three Short Essays
Norberto Pablo Cirio Free Chair of Afro-Argentine and African-American Studies National University of La Plata Argentina
H
erein I pool three short essays that do not make up a unit of meaning, but rather reflect the still great gap between saying and doing, between academic theory and practice, with respect to the Afro- Argentine issue. I notice an unjustified time lag in important contemporary scholars. Only the third essay precedes the idea of this article, and I wrote it in May 2013, after visiting an exhibition about Argentine music in Buenos Aires, in which I thought I have participated because I was asked for a documented application.
1. There is no case: Afro-culture does not enter into the academic consciousness It is suggestive that, at this stage of conceptual progress in the humanistic and social disciplines, the Afro-culture practically neither occupy a place nor cause a reflection. It isn ´ t even nominally included as part of our diversity in the agendas and in the publications by many researchers who boast about being avant-garde. Without prejudice to their work in general and at least in this respect, they follow the dictum of what I call academic common sense, that is, they just mirror the pseudo-certainties introduced into the citizens’ common sense by hegemonic power groups, rather than taking the ways recommended by the scientific method to apprehend, to question, and to address reality away from the usual perspectives. In this brief text, I intend to alert against an academy— allegedly up-to-date with the latest( post) theories on the subject— that continues to abound in a discourse that lags decades behind the state of the art in the field of African American( pre) studies. All the authors listed below are referential researchers in their respective disciplines. Thus, the call of attention is double. Juan Pablo González, a Chilean musicologist who has been at the top ten of American musicology for so long, has published Thinking Music from Latin America( Buenos Aires, 2013). It is a compendium of articles that have been appearing in various magazines during the last decade( some of them more than once), updated and revised to give them coherence under convenient new titles. The chapter " Colonial Listening "( pp. 61-78) seeks to be theoretical, as it analyzes— in the face of a renewed musicology— how importance is the geo-location as Americans for having an essential epistemic position to produce original knowledge. González begins with a review of how the American society was established. He recurrently based it on the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who lucidly understood that " Europe is going to racialize its relations of power with the
112