What does it mean to be an African today? Starting from that question the author takes the reader on a fascinating intellectual journey into the realm of Pan-African thought and practice. Moving from Africa to North America to Europe, the text insightfully explores the pre-occupations of black elite, in the three continents, exploring their shared visions and also their conflicting interests. Tackling thought provoking issues in politics, cultural identity, and economic development, the book provides the reader with a refreshing, jargon free insight into relations between Africa and the African Diaspora. A must read for anyone interested in politics, identity and development in Africa and the African Diaspora.
What does it mean to be an African today? Starting from that question, the author takes the reader on a fascinating intellectual journey into the realm of Pan-African thought and practice. Moving from Africa to North America to Europe, the text insightfully explores the pre-occupations of black elite, in the three continents, exploring their shared visions and also their conflicting interests. Tackling thought provoking issues in politics, cultural identity, and economic development, the book provides the reader with a refreshing, jargon free insight into relations between Africa and the African Diaspora. A must read for anyone interested in politics, identity and development in Africa and the African Diaspora.
The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism provides an international, intersectional, and interdisciplinary overview of, and approach to, Pan-Africanism, making an invaluable contribution to the ongoing evolution of Pan-Africanism and demonstrating its continued significance in the 21st century. The handbook features expert introductions to, and critical explorations of, the most important historic and current subjects, theories, and controversies of Pan-Africanism and the evolution of black internationalism. Pan-Africanism is explored and critically engaged from different disciplinary points of view, emphasizing the multiplicity of perspectives and foregrounding an intersectional approach. The contributors provide erudite discussions of black internationalism, black feminism, African feminism, and queer Pan-Africanism alongside surveys of black nationalism, black consciousness, and Caribbean Pan-Africanism. Chapters on neo-colonialism, decolonization, and Africanization give way to chapters on African social movements, the African Union, and the African Renaissance. Pan-African aesthetics are probed via literature and music, illustrating the black internationalist impulse in myriad continental and diasporan artists’ work. Including 36 chapters by acclaimed established and emerging scholars, the handbook is organized into seven parts, each centered around a comprehensive theme: Intellectual origins, historical evolution, and radical politics of Pan-Africanism Pan-Africanist theories Pan-Africanism in the African diaspora Pan-Africanism in Africa Literary Pan-Africanism Musical Pan-Africanism The contemporary and continued relevance of Pan-Africanism in the 21st century The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism is an indispensable source for scholars and students with research interests in continental and diasporan African history, sociology, politics, economics, and aesthetics. It will also be a very valuable resource for those working in interdisciplinary fields, such as African studies, African American studies, Caribbean studies, decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, women and gender studies, and queer studies.
There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recent political waves that have swept across North Africa and their implications to the study of twenty-first century Pan-African solidarity on the African continent. The ways in which African institutions are attracting and mobilizing returnees and Pan-Africanists with incentives as dual-citizenship for diasporans to support reforms in Africa offers a new alternative approach for exploring Pan-African ideology in the twenty-first century. Returnees are also using these incentives to gain economic and cultural advantage. The book will appeal to policy makers, government institutions, research libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from many different disciplines.
The first survey of the Pan-African movement this century, this book provides a history of the individuals and organisations that have sought the unity of all those of African origin as the basis for advancement and liberation. Initially an idea and movement that took root among the African Diaspora, in more recent times Pan-Africanism has been embodied in the African Union, the organisation of African states which includes the entire African Diaspora as its 'sixth region'. Hakim Adi covers many of the key political figures of the 20th century, including Du Bois, Garvey, Malcolm X, Nkrumah and Gaddafi, as well as Pan-African culture expression from Négritude to the wearing of the Afro hair style and the music of Bob Marley.
Most Western-driven theories do not have a place in Black communicative experience, especially in Africa. Many scholars interested in articulating and interrogating Black communication scholarship are therefore at the crossroads of either having to use Western-driven theory to explain a Black communication dynamic, or have to use hypothetical rules to achieve their objectives, since they cannot find compelling Black communication theories to use as reference. Colonization and the African slave trade brought with it assimilationist tendencies that have dealt a serious blow on the cognition of most Blacks on the continent and abroad. As a result, their interpersonal as well as in-group dialogic communication had witnessed dramatic shifts. Black/Africana Communication Theory assembles skilled communicologists who propose uniquely Black-driven theories that stand the test of time. Throughout the volume’s fifteen chapters theories including but not limited to Afrocentricity, Afro-Cultural Mulatto, Venerative Speech Theory, Africana Symbolic Contextualism Theory, HaramBuntu-Government-Diaspora Communications Theory, Consciencist Communication Theory and Racial Democracy Effect Theory are introduced and discussed.
Using case-studies from those who have moved either transnationally or internally within their own country, international contributors offer various definitions of what it means to make a living on the move.
Ripped from motherland and family, ethnically mixed to quell the potential of uprisings, and brutalized by regimes of hard labor, the heart - the spirit - of Africa did not stop beating in the New World. Rather, it survived and has re-emerged; changed by contacts with new cultures and environments, but still part of the continuum of African tradition: an African Re-Genesis. This is the first volume in its field to emphasize the interdisciplinary temporal and geographic comparative research of Archaeology, Anthropology, History and Linguistics to allow us to form unique perspectives on broader trends in the transformation and (re-) emergence of African Diaspora cultures. African Re-Genesis confirms that regardless of discipline, from continental Africa to Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Indian Ocean, all Diaspora research requires a relevance to modern communities and sensitivity to the interplay with contemporary cultural identities. Matters concerning race and cultural diversity, though ostensibly de-fused by the vocabulary of political correctness, remain contentious. Indeed, the topic of racial relations has become to the twenty-first century what sex was to the nineteenth century - something best not discussed in public, and better talked around than confronted directly. African Re-Genesis strikes at the nerve of urgency that the past, present and future globalization of African cultures, is a cornerstone of the entire human experience, and it thus deserves recognition as such.
Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.
