Can the Humanities Sing Again?

[...]we outlined an agenda for future conversations and collaborations that would take us beyond these undeniably urgent concerns and commitments, and we are in the process of planning a follow-up meeting in Canada during the coming year that might address the needs, inter alia, to reinterpret European knowledge systems, or at least identify their relevance for a twenty-first century in which African and Asian heritages are becoming hard currency and to reconcile what might be called orthodox inquiry in the humanities-whether western or eastern, northern or southern-with the traditional intellectual and spiritual inheritances of the indigenous peoples of both countries, inheritances which (among other things) often redefine accepted distinctions and directions in the sciences. In recent times, the global discourse has coalesced around the supposed advantages to society of fostering knowledge which favours applied science and free-market economics-taken together, they are often called "the knowledge economy"-with students and their parents thinking of higher education as a form of private investment and with public resources (driving national research strategies) now stressing the idea of innovation as a code word for quality. [...]in both Canada and South Africa solid academic fields in the humanities-comparative literature is a good example, but there are many, many others-are either threatened or have already fallen away. [...]when we celebrate the traditions of landscape art from the tropical to temperate rainforests, from savannahs and steppes to mountains and valleys, and from vlei to veld, we might also open up questions about whose land it is, how much land is enough, and where home is, questions that have preoccupied many of the classical writers located at the centre of the European humanities-Seneca comes to mind-and that continue to trouble the very people-indigenous or immigrant or refugee-whose lives we chronicle with such disinterested enthusiasm. [...]there is no human society that has been without music, and chanting down Babylon has always been the genuinely radical alternative to burning it down.