Rich Black Folk and Cultural Suicide (1932)

On the question of Leo Frobenius and the African Legacy:

“To the best of my knowledge there is nothing more odious in the eye of the ang-sax eddikater than a man or book showing unusual perceptive aptitude, and nothing for which it is more difficult to find a place in our stultified and stultifying system.

It is not necessary to be a bad boy or a disturber of somnolence, or that fat old male women should remember you as you were at 16.  It is enough that Fenellosa should have heard of China, a subject unfamiliar to Carus, or that Frobenius should have been to Africa before there was a chair of Africanology at Hawvud to delay the reception of either for twenty or forty years.

I should also have more respect for the Afro-American intelligentzia and for the Negro millionaires, etc., that are rumoured to flourish in Harlem if they had shown more alacrity in hearing of an author who has shown their race its true character of nobility and who has dug out of Africa tradition overlaid on tradition to set against the traditions of Europe and Asia.”

– Ezra Pound