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Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, author of "dark mother: african origins and godmothers
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Janie Rezner
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Sep 02, 2005 12:08 PDT
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Press Release
Janie Rezner, box 1441, mendocino, ca 95469 707 962-9277
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Author of "dark mother : african origins and godmothers" will be Janie Rezner's guest on Women's Voices, September 12, 7 pm on KZYX & Z.
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, and sicilian american, is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Growing up in a sicilian neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri in the 20's, she found her way to California and received her Ph.D. in the intellectual history of the united States, and early modern and modern history of Europe, from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught U.S. history and the humanities. In 1967 as professor of history at San Francisco State, Lucia helped to found the Peace and Freedom Party, opposing racism and imperialism . And, along with two other professors was fired for supporting students striking against institutionalized racism in the U.S. and the war in Vietnam. She writes, "In 1969 I went to Italy in search of my grandmothers, where I found the italian feminist movement. This seemed like wine. (There is no revolution without women's liberation. There is no woman's liberation without revolution)"
Lucia's professional work developed from that of a traditional historian to the continually widening methodologies of a feminist cultural scholar concerned with submerged beliefs. She writes in the overview to her next book, The Future has an Ancient Heart, "World geneticists have confirmed african origins of all humans in the DNA, and DNA is inherited via the mother. My historical research in countries around the Mediterranean substantiates that africans brought with them (on their migration paths) a memory of the earliest venerations we know, that of an african dark mother, a memory expressed in signs, notably the pubic V and the color ochre red."
Lucia continues, "The part of this story I want to tell as a feminist cultural historian refers to the places I had explored earlier but viewed after 2001 through the lens of the documented premise of african origins of all humans and african migrations after 60,000-50,000 BCE to every continent, as well as to explore the hypothesis that everyone on earth carries, in cellular and/or cultural memory a remembrance of the african dark mother. . . . .and the hypothesis that black madonnas, and other dark women divinities of the world are our most visible evidence of the memory of our ancient african mother.
That the values that people in subaltern cultures associated with black madonnas are: justice with compassion/nurturance/healing, equality, and transformation, and when dominant cultures suppressed or modified the values of the dark mother, her values persisted in strong peasant women in the middle ages, and are apparent in modern feminism, ecology, and nonviolent movements."
And, "if we realize that everyone has the same dark mother, won't it be harder to drop bombs on "others?" If everyone has the same dark mother, who are the dark others?"
Please join in this interesting discussion. Phone calls will be taken. Can be heard live at www.kzyx.org 7pm Pacific Time
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