"African Humanity: Creativity, Identity and Personhood is a collection of thought-provoking essays from scholars around the world on topics that inform new ways of thinking while engaging critical perspectives about Africa and the African Diaspora. The essays focus on the discourse of creativity, culture, identity and well-being from multiple fields such as design, art, gender studies, education, health and museum studies in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Africa and the African Diaspora. This multidisciplinary group of global scholars offer a critical dialogue on topics such as the creative process in Africa and the African Diaspora; gender and creative space; histories of creativity and inventions; globalized modernity and its consequence on cultural performances; politics of creativity; creativity, performance and Nollywood; social, political, and economic ramifications of creativity and design; ethical issues in creativity; and sustainability, well-being and the environment. The book's goal is to offer a comparative critical dialogue for a multidisciplinary academic audience, artists, grassroots activists, diverse communities and interested members of the general public. It has five distinct sections: Gender, Education, and Language; Design and Art in Africa and Its Diaspora; Creativity, Performance and Nollywood; Identity and Institutions of Politics and Living; and Sustainability, Health and the Environment. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin"--
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book A Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book A New York Times Notable Book Once in a generation a book such as African Exodus emerges to transform the way we see ourselves. This landmark book, which argues that our genes betray the secret of a single racial stock shared by all of modern humanity, has set off one of the most bitter debates in contemporary science. "We emerged out of Africa," the authors cont, "less than 100,000 years ago and replaced all other human populations." Employing persuasive fossil and genetic evidence (the proof is in the blood, not just the bones) and an exceptionally readable style, Stringer and McKie challenge long-held beliefs that suggest we evolved separately as different races with genetic roots reaching back two million years.
Exploring issues of disability culture, activism, and policy across the African continent, this volume argues for the recognition of African disability studies as an important and emerging interdisciplinary field.
This book explores important chapters of past and recent African history from a multidisciplinary perspective. It covers an extensive time range from the evolution of early humans to the complex cultural and genetic diversity of modern-day populations in Africa. Through a comprehensive list of chapters, the book focuses on different time-periods, geographic regions and cultural and biological aspects of human diversity across the continent. Each chapter summarises current knowledge with perspectives from a varied set of international researchers from diverse areas of expertise. The book provides a valuable resource for scholars interested in evolutionary history and human diversity in Africa. Contributors are Shaun Aron, Ananyo Choudhury, Bernard Clist, Cesar Fortes-Lima, Rosa Fregel, Jackson S. Kimambo, Faye Lander , Marlize Lombard, Fidelis T. Masao, Ezekia Mtetwa, Gilbert Pwiti, Michèle Ramsay, Thembi Russell, Carina Schlebusch, Dhriti Sengupta, Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi, Mário Vicente.
One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains. Maslin argues that the impact of changing landscapes and fluctuating climates that led to the appearance of intermittent freshwater lakes in East Africa may have played a key role in human evolution. Alongside the physical evidence of fossils and tools, he considers social theories of why a large, complex brain would have provided a major advantage when trying to survive in the constantly changing East African landscape.
In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.
An interpretative history of human rights in Africa, exploring indigenous rights traditions, anti-slavery, anti-colonialism, post-colonial violations and pro-democracy movements.
My thesis is basically intended for theological and philosophical students and at the same-time their lecturers in biblical theology, systematic theology and philosophy of religion. There is no doubt in my mind that these disciplines must surgically forcefully put through the hermeneutical operation of radicalism and liberation black theology and black studies. Because liberation black theology and black studies are both pertinent and existential to black people not only in the diaspora but principally within the demography of Africa. Why? Because Africa is the social, economic, political, scientific, spiritual, theological and psychological incubation chamber with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and semantic cultural Christianization of Africans. The besom merchants, traders, planters, slavers, missionaries, philosophers, historians, theologians and scientists, with savagery and brutality imposed on African slaves mendaciously that enslavement was good for Africans. It is therefore apposite for liberation black theology and black studies particularly in praxis to critique and challenge the systems and endogenous forces that violated and emasculated Africans empowerment and humanity. The slaves were brutally transformed physically and psychologically. The slaves potentialities endowed with the imprint of the African traditional belief in a supreme being and prime mover of the cosmos was transgressed with falsehood that their belief in a supreme being was primitive and paganistic. For Africans the supreme being is within their inner consciousness. The enslavement of Africans was without morality and justice. The creation of a symbiosis of liberation theology, liberation black theology and hermeneutical application and praxis is sempiternal significance to the black experience and the Jesus of the black experience that gives timba to the dis-empowered blacks of the streets of Accra and the continent of Africa that were consciously made into the apocalyptic and eschatological symbol of poverty, dis-possessed, impuissant politically and economically in a world that is dominated with nuclear weapons and technological hegemony. In the midst of such imbalance and the perversion of justice and equality regardless of ethnicity, black people must make the conscious, spiritual and psychological connection with the Jesus of the stigmata of the imprisoned African slaves on the Middle Passage and the diabolical plantations. There is no another way according to the sociological, theological, psychological impacting force of the various violations of Africans dignity, liberty, freedom, equality and humanity of black people in all dimensions of struggles to become veridical human beings in the full image of God. That is to say, theologically and sociologically the derivatives of shalom culminating in the absolute restoration of black humanity. With the force of chimerical-ism twinned with the black mans epistemological dreams without empiricism and existentialism. It is at this juncture that all the mythological aspirations are reduced to the level of stultification because Christianity with the painting of a white plastic Jesus cannot be connected with the black experience. When on Good Friday black people sing with effusive passion Jesus keep me near the Cross the Kebuka and Maafa on the plantation sufferings, brutalization and de-humanization rings with
Describes the process by which the author uses knowledge of fossil discoveries and comparative ape and human anatomy to create forensically accurate representations of human beings' ancient ancestors.
