Chinua Achebe's novels and essays have always drawn our attention to issues of memory, the story, history and our own obligation to history as Africans. Achebe constantly goes back to the authority of narrative - the story; and as the subsequent generations of African writers like Chimamanda Adichie keep returning to, to celebrate Africa's many stories, its moments of failure and triumph. Achebe, more than any other writer on this continent, has inspired many, and hopefully the African story tellers of the coming centuries, irrespective of their location will continue to be inspired by him. This collection of essays is an enduring tribute to this rich legacy of Achebe.
Ubuntu is premised on the ethical belief that an individual's humanity is fostered in a network of human relationships: I am because you are; we are because you are. The essays in this lively volume elevate the debate about ubuntu beyond the buzzword it has become, especially within South African religious and political contexts. The seasoned scholars and younger voices gathered here grapple with a range of challenges that ubuntu puts forward. They break down its history and analyze its intellectual surroundings in African philosophical traditions, European modernism, religious contexts, and human rights discourses. The discussion embraces questions about what it means to be human and to be a part of a community, giving attention to moments of loss and fragmentation in postcolonial modernity, to come to a more meaningful definition of belonging in a globalizing world. Taken together, these essays offer a rich understanding of ubuntu in all of its complexity and reflect on a value system rooted in the everyday practices of ordinary people in their daily encounters with churches, schools, and other social institutions.
This book is a timely addition to debates and explorations on the epistemological relevance of African proverbs, especially with growing calls for the decolonisation of African curricula. The editors and contributors have chosen to reflect on the diverse ways of being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress by drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe's harnessing of the effectualness of oratory, especially his use of proverbs in his works. The book recognises and celebrates the fact that Achebe's proverbial Igbo imaginations of being and becoming African are compelling because they are instructive about the lives, stories, struggles and aspirations of the rainbow of people that make up Africa as a veritable global arena of productive circulations, entanglements and compositeness of being. The contributions foray into how claims to and practices of being and becoming African are steeped in histories of mobilities and a myriad of encounters shaped by and inspiring of the competing and complementary logics of personhood and power that Africans have sought and seek to capture in their repertoires of proverbs. The task of documenting African proverbs and rendering them accessible in the form of a common hard currency with fascinating epistemological possibilities remains a challenge yearning for financial, scholarly, social and political attention. The book is an important contribution to John Mbiti's clarion call for an active and sustained interest in African proverbs.
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
In many African countries, litigants experience significant uncertainty in their attempts to enforce foreign judgments. Drawing on the experiences of the United Kingdom and the United States (vis-à-vis efforts to attain an effective global legal framework on foreign judgments), this book undertakes a comparative analysis of how South African and Nigerian courts can promote the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in a fair manner. This comparative analysis is made considering both African countries as paradigms of their respective legal traditions. The author, a legal consultant and academic in private international law analyses, stage by stage, the challenging process that litigants face when they seek to enforce foreign judgments in South Africa and Nigeria. This analysis includes insightful consideration of broader issues such as the following: how challenges faced by judgment creditors may be circumvented; practical issues impeding the free movement of foreign judgments; impact of globalisation, increase in international commercial transactions, and regionalism on private international law; application of ‘fairness’; how territorial sovereignty and State interests in international commerce impede the free movement of foreign judgments; and ‘qualified obligation’, under which courts would presumptively enforce foreign judgments subject to certain exceptions and to the balancing of competing interests between private litigants and the State. The comparative analysis is undergirded by relevant case law – spanning decades in Africa and centuries in Europe and the United States. In summary, the author projects a clear case for predictability and certainty in the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, as well as how to go about it, thus offering lawyers a strategic position to weigh their options in contemplating enforcement of foreign judgments in any jurisdiction even beyond the African region. This innovative approach will also be of particular value to policymakers at national levels, international and regional economic organisations, as well as scholars in private international law and international commercial law generally. This is regardless of their specific legal area or niche, especially considering the dearth of literature in African private international law.
Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.
In Daybreak is Near ... : Literature, Clans and the Nation-State in Somalia, Ali Jimale Ahmed examines the role literature has played in modern Somali society of the past half century. The writer examines Somali literature, both written and oral, to trace the development of Somali nationalism, as well as seek explanations for the disintegration of the post-colonial Somali nation-state.
In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.
Ubuntu in its broadest sense is rooted in the belief that the full development of personhood comes with shared identity and the idea that an individual's humanity is fostered in a network of relationships: I am because you are; we are because you are. The chapters in this book seek to interrogate this relational quality of personhood embodied in Ubuntu. The book further seeks to examine whether we can talk about relational personhood without running the risk of essentialism.
