Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West

Bibliographic Data

ID5770907
AuthorsSuzanne Marchand (0000-0002-2518-4630, Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume32
Issue2
Pages153-170
Publication date1997-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200949703200202
OpenAlexW1739711820
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited4

Wrath', that is, the wrath of Achilles, is invoked in the first line of Homer's Iliad, and the following tale, though farcical by comparison to the tale of Achilles' adventures, should similarly open by emphasizing wrath, rage and ressentiment. Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), German ethnologist, was, of course, no Homeric hero, though he was, by his own testimony, 'brought up to be a wanderer',' and spent his whole life in motion, between Germany and Africa, between the natural and the cultural sciences, between lunacy and scholarship. In addition to spinning out dozens of speculative ur-histories involving moon-goddesses, mystical numbers and the lost continent of Atlantis, Frobenius was a prodigious collector of data and artifacts and one of the first Europeans to try to reconstruct the history of pre-Islamic Africa. After the Great War, his paeans to unspoiled, ur-African blackness and his bitter attacks on Eurocentric historiography and western 'materialism' appealed powerfully to many of his contemporaries; his works caught the attention of, among others, Ezra Pound, Johan Huizinga, the exiled German Kaiser, and an important group of African students in Paris, who adapted Frobenius's neoromantic fascination with Negerheit to their own anti-colonial purposes. A man of epic passions and dissatisfactions, Frobenius was instrumental both in launching a vitalist critique of the west and in crafting the methodological weapons that helped to destroy Eurocentric historiography. A devoted ethnographer and disgruntled patriot, Frobenius trained one eye on primitive vitality and the other on civilized apocalypse. He loved West Africa with an unprecedented ardour, but could muster only disdain for his discipline, his colleagues, his country, and even his hemisphere. He was certainly not alone in his generation in performing remarkable feats of treasure-trawling or conjuring primitivist reveries, in loving Africa and hating Europe, but his combination of traits otherwise exhibited by Heinrich Schliemann, Emil Nolde, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Gaugin is assuredly

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