Finalist
for the 2004 Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association for
the most important scholarly work in African studies published in
English during the preceding year:
"Chernoff's book is powerful,
poetic, dramatic and full of images of sorrow, pain, joy, pleasure and
laughter. It admirably and accurately documents the emotions,
struggles and dreams of a postcolonial African generation.
Hawa's
views, interpretation and/or bodily reactions to her condition redefine
the meaning of youth and how contemporary African societies are
struggling to (re)construct childhood, parenthood and public
authorities. Hustling
is a powerful intervention in African
studies in the very fact that Chernoff makes audible the voice of the
narrator, proposing sometimes-admirable monologues and other times
engaging in a dialogue with Hawa or opening the conversation to other
voices. Hawa's voice as the embodiment of Africa's
contemporary
condition is reminiscent of Ousmane Sembene's character Penda, a
prostitute in God's
Bits of Wood. This book is also one of the more challenging, provocative
and very successful attempts to reinvent a new ethnographic and anthropological
language, which reconciles the aesthetic and poetic [style] of a narrative and
the search for intelligible [interpretative discussion as a] proper characteristic of social sciences. A great tour de
force."
Winner of the 2004 Victor
Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic
Anthropology:
"John Chernoff earned his Ph.D. in social science and religion at the
Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1974 and is an independent scholar
living in Pittsburgh. Hustling
Is Not Stealing is his second groundbreaking
book. In 1979, he published African Rhythm and African
Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms,
based on a
decade studying music in social life in Ghana and training to achieve
performance proficiency in several African musical idioms.
The research for Hustling
Is Not Stealing grew out of his interest in young people
whose musical tastes he followed in urban nightclubs. In the
stories of Hawa, an African bar girl
who moves between city and village, we are captivated by the experience
of
culture as a personal challenge, by 'a radically alternative approach
to life
and living.'"
Best reader letter:
Good afternoon Mister Chernoff. My name is [ . . . ] and I just finished
reading your two Africa bar girl books. To say they are phenomenal and I am
highly impressed would be a massive understatement. If you did not receive every
literary award available in the years they were published, a grievous and
tremendous injustice occurred.
During the nineteen eighties I spent a lot of time in Asia and am familiar with
the bar girl scene in Thailand and several other countries, but even without
that background I would still consider the books extraordinary.
Regarding
the academics, I am sure they are quite envious. Not in two hundred million
years could the typical American scholar amass the wealth of information you
did. In fact I suspect even you do not realize how monumental your works are.