The Ramatoulaye-Aissatou Styles in Contemporary African Feminism(s)

Abstract

On my way to the 1988 international phenomenology/aesthetics symposium at Michigan State University, a business story in Vis-à-Vis (a United Airlines monthly magazine) caught my attention. Perhaps this commercial news article can benefit not only the business sector but also global thinking in general. The magazine reports: “An American executive was having lunch with a prominent businessman from the Far East. The American asked, ‘What is the most important language for world trade?’ The American expected the reply to be ‘English.’ But the Asian answered, without hesitation, ‘The most important language for world trade is my customer’s language’.”¹ This story raises the general and prevalent problem of how best to relate to a cultural other whether in business or in academia or in popular culture or in government. The United States, for example, has about 6% of the world’s population and consumes about 30–40% of the world’s natural resources, but it does not correspondingly consume or experience an equivalent percentage of the world’s culture. The more important matter here concerns not the low quantitative American experience of the cultural others (especially the Southern others of the world) but the quality of this very limited experience.