Critical Perspectives on African Genocide
Critical Perspectives on African Genocide

Author: Alfred Frankowski

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1538150018

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Genocide has become a part of the contemporary global expression of political violence. After all, every continent has had its genocide, but genocide in Africa and the African diaspora is distinctly different from those in Europe or the West. This text approaches genocide from within the context of Africa and the African diaspora to examine political and philosophical after-effects of global colonialism. As genocidal state violence has become prominent through colonialism, its appearance in Europe and the West have developed sharply against how it appears in colonized spaces within the African diaspora. This text argues that such a difference in orientation is needed to develop new concepts, critical approaches, and perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and anti-black politics as a way of critically understanding global genocide and the presence of continual genocidal violence.

Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa

Author: John L. Comaroff

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780226114149

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The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

A Discourse on African Philosophy
A Discourse on African Philosophy

Author: Christian B. N. Gade

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1498512267

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Many have argued that ubuntu was a formative influence on the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa’s famous transitional justice mechanism. A Discourse on African Philosophy: A New Perspective on Ubuntu and Transitional Justice in South Africa challenges and contextualizes this view in a way that not only provides new findings and reflections on ubuntu and the TRC, but also contributes to the field of African philosophy. One of Christian B. N. Gade’s key findings, founded on qualitative interviews in South Africa, is that some former TRC commissioners and committee members question the importance of ubuntu in the TRC process. Another is that there are several differing and historically developing interpretations of ubuntu, some of which have evident political implications and reflect non-factual and creative uses of history. Thus ubuntu is not a shared cultural heritage, in the ethnophilosophical sense of a static property characterizing a group. In fact, throughout this book Gade argues that the ethnophilosophical approach to African philosophy as a static group property is highly problematic. Gade’s research presents an alternative collective discourse on African philosophy (“collective” in the sense that it does not focus on any single individual in particular) that takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously. This book will be of interest to scholars in African philosophy, transitional justice, politics and cultural heritage, and law in South Africa.

Critical Perspectives on African Politics
Critical Perspectives on African Politics

Author: Clive Gabay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1317686128

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Strong states and strong civil societies are now increasingly hailed as the twin drivers of a ‘rising Africa’. Current attempts to support growth and democracy are part of a longer history of promoting projects of disciplinary, regulatory and liberal rule and values beyond ‘the West’. Yet this is not simply Western domination of a passive continent. Such an interpretation misses out on the complexities and nuances of the politics of state-building and civil society promotion, and the central role of African agency. Drawing upon critical theory, including postcolonial and governmentality approaches, this book interrogates international practices of state-building and civil society support in Africa. It seeks to develop a theoretically informed critical approach to discourses and interventions such as those associated with broadly ‘Western’ initiatives in Africa. In doing so, the book highlights the power relations, inequalities, coercion and violence that are deeply implicated within contemporary international interventions on the African continent. Providing a range of empirical cases and theoretical approaches, the chapters are united by their critical treatment of political dynamics in Africa. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African politics, development studies, postcolonial theory, International Relations, international political economy and peacekeeping/making.

Critical Perspectives in Politics and Socio-Economic Development in Ghana
Critical Perspectives in Politics and Socio-Economic Development in Ghana

Author: Wisdom J. Tettey

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 9789004130135

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This volume provides a comprehensive and integrated analysis of contemporary Ghanaian politics and economy and their relationship to culture. It combines rich, recent, empirical material with sophisticated theoretical analyses, bringing fresh and unique interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the issues examined.

Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person
Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person

Author: Edwin Etieyibo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-07-24

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1498583660

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Ifeanyi Menkiti’s articulation of an African conception of personhood—especially in “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought” —has become very influential in African philosophy. Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person contributes to the debate in African philosophy on personhood by engaging with various aspects of Menkiti’s account of person and community. The contributors examine this account in relation to themes such as individualism, communalism, rights, individual liberty, moral agency, communal ethics, education, state and nation building, elderhood and ancestorhood. Through these themes, this book, edited by Edwin Etieyibo and Polycarp Ikuenobe, shows that Menkiti’s account of personhood in the context of community is both fundamental and foundational to epistemological, metaphysical, logical, ethical, legal, social and political issues in African thought systems.

Against Decolonisation
Against Decolonisation

Author: Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1787388859

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Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

The New South Africa at Twenty
The New South Africa at Twenty

Author: Peter C. J. Vale

Publisher: University of Kwazulu Natal Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781869142896

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In this book, some of South Africa's finest academic minds reflect on 20 years of democratic rule in the country. How far have South Africans really come? Is race still an entrenched issue in the country? Why does gender discrimination continue? Why are the poor in revolt? Is free expression under threat? What happened to South African Marxism? What drives Julius Malema? How have the unions experienced the post-apartheid years? These (and many other) questions are examined. Analytical and accessible, the book continues a long tradition of engaging South Africa's politics and society in a non-partisan, but critical, fashion. It opens the way for innate explanations and provides insights that lie beyond the workaday accounts usually offered by pundits. [Subject: Sociology, African Studies, Politics]

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa

Author: Wale Adebanwi

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1847011659

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Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa. What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual oeuvre of the influential Africanist economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, who provides an Afterword. The contributors analyse the politicaleconomy of everyday life as it relates to money and currency; migrant labour forces and informal and formal economies; dispossession of land; debt and indebtedness; socio-economic marginality; and the entrenchment of colonial andapartheid pasts. Wale Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. He is author of Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press).

Critical Perspectives of Educational Technology in Africa
Critical Perspectives of Educational Technology in Africa

Author: Bellarmine A. Ezumah

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2021-11-03

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 9783030537302

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This book is a critical-cultural evaluation of educational technology adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa, including projects such as the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). It presents efficient ways of improving education delivery among low-income communities through designing and implementing congruent educational technologies that incorporate social and cultural proclivities. Ezumah defines technology with regards to pedagogy, and seeks to debunk the assumption that educational technology consists only of digital and interactive options. Additionally, she argues for a narrative paradigm shift aimed at validating analog technologies as equally capable of providing necessary and desired educational objectives and outcomes for communities who cannot afford the digital alternatives. By comparing African educational systems in precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial times and incorporating the history of technology transfers from the Global North to South, the book highlights cultural imperialism, development theory, neocolonialism, and hegemonic tendencies.