Odd reception

Today I presented version 2.05 or so of Anita's and my paper on the social memory of Walter Rodney and the Rodney Riots in Jamaica. I managed to get through my allotted time without stumbling too much. Then came the discussion, which consisted in the discussant saying that he liked the paper and hadn't known anything about Walter Rodney (hadn't even looked him up); I suppose since he's a political economist (I did look him up) that pan-Africanist and Marxist scholars who've been dead for a quarter century were out of his area of knowledge. One of the audience members said to me that she liked the paper, and she, too, had never heard of Rodney. On the bright side, one of my fellow panelists had, but then she, like Rodney, is Guyanese.