Status Updates From The Fetish Revisited: Marx,...

"The Afro-Atlantic religious appreciation of beads and cowries is no more foolish than the equally religious Euro-American appreciation of gold and dollar bills. Each form of appreciation mimes confidence in the continuity of one set of relationships between people and between peoples who habitually rely on these materials to create social relationships, ..."

"Yet both formulations are studiously ignorant of African self-understandings and aspirations, reducing Africans to rhetorical tropes rather than human beings."

"Thus, particularly in Freudian analyses of fetishism, Africans can play opposite rhetorical roles— sometimes as the antitype of civilized humanity and sometimes as the proto- types of a shared humanity."

"Hegel and Marx endeavored to expel this darkness from Europe, while Freud vacillated be- tween efforts to show, on the one hand, that assimilated Jews like him have repressed and risen above this darkness and, on the other, that this darkness inhabited civilized gentiles as much as civilized Jews."