Nihilism and Negritude

Nihilism and Negritude PDF Author: Célestin Monga
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Describes and analyzes the present "black condition" in the African context. Recreates the imaginaries of present-day Africa, from the picturesque absurdity of daily life to the political economics of marriage, from the philosophy of menus and table manners to the uses of the body

Imagining the Postcolonial

Imagining the Postcolonial PDF Author: Jaime Hanneken
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438456239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Imagining the Postcolonial is the first book dedicated to comparative analysis of Latin American and francophone postcolonial identity. Jaime Hanneken examines the disciplinary, theoretical, and political stakes involved in postcolonial identification in non-anglophone cultural spheres through readings of José Lezama Lima and Édouard Glissant's poetics of place, the symbolic value of Paris in modernista writing and in Congolese Sociétés des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes (sape) rituals, and the scandals surrounding Rigoberta Menchú and Yambo Ouologuem. Hanneken argues that reorienting comparative critique to the priority of the object of study can transform rather than replicate existing conceptual formats of postcoloniality.

African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition

African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition PDF Author: Bruce B. Janz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350292192
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Using classic texts in African philosophy, Bruce B. Janz applies the strand of cognitive science known as enactivism to realise new connections and intersections between both fields. The idea that cognition is embodied and embedded in a social world neatly maps onto specifically African epistemologies to outline a new direction of study on what philosophy is. By working through a rich range of texts and thinkers, Janz provides a fruitful new interpretation of African philosophy and provides close readings of seminal and sidelined thinkers to provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars. Janz's study takes in the creative humanism of Sylvia Wynter, Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy, Mbiti's theory of time, Oruka's last work on sage philosophy, Mogobe Ramose's own version of Ubuntu, Sophie Oluwole's active literature of philosophy, Achille Mbembe's excoriating attack on the effects of colonialism on life in Africa, and Suzanne Césaire writings on négritude. This book reorients African philosophy towards an active and creative future informed by enactivist thinking.

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions PDF Author: Elias Kifon Bongmba
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405196904
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions brings together a team of international scholars to create a single-volume resource on the religious beliefs and practices of the peoples in Africa. Offers broad coverage of issues relating to African religions, considering experiences in indigenous, Christian, and Islamic traditions across the continent Contributors are from a variety of fields, ensuring the volume offers multidisciplinary perspectives Explores methodological approaches to religion from anthropological, philosophical, and historical perspectives Provides insights into the historical developments in African religions, as well as contemporary issues such as the development of African-initiated churches, neo traditional religions, and Pentecostalism Discusses important topics at the intersection of culture and religion in Africa, including the arts, health, politics, globalization, gender relations, and the economy

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa PDF Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847011659
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
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).

Toward a Just Society

Toward a Just Society PDF Author: Martin Guzman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546807
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
Joseph Stiglitz is one of the world’s greatest economists. He has made fundamental contributions to economic theory in areas such as inequality, the implications of imperfect and asymmetric information, and competition, and he has been a major figure in policy making, a leading public intellectual, and a remarkably influential teacher and mentor. This collection of essays influenced by Stiglitz’s work celebrates his career as a scholar and teacher and his aspiration to put economic knowledge in the service of creating a fairer world. Toward a Just Society brings together a range of essays whose breadth reflects how Stiglitz has shaped modern economics. The contributions to this volume, all penned by high-profile authors who have been guided by or collaborated with Stiglitz over the last five decades, span microeconomics, macroeconomics, inequality, development, law and economics, and public policy. Touching on many of the central debates and discoveries of the field and providing insights on the directions that academic economics could take in the future, Toward a Just Society is an extraordinary celebration of the many paths Stiglitz has opened for economics, politics, and public life.

A History of the Republic of Biafra

A History of the Republic of Biafra PDF Author: Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108895956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. Samuel Fury Childs Daly examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. In these dangerous conditions, many people survived by engaging in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. When the fighting ended in 1970, these survival tactics endured, even though Biafra itself disappeared from the map. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, Daly catalogues how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front, and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the country's long experience of crime that was to follow.

Philosophy in a Meaningless Life

Philosophy in a Meaningless Life PDF Author: James Tartaglia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474247687
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Philosophy in a Meaningless Life provides an account of the nature of philosophy which is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. It makes a powerful and vivid case for believing that this question is neither obscure nor obsolete, but reflects a quintessentially human concern to which other traditional philosophical problems can be readily related; allowing them to be reconnected with natural interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition across philosophy's debates. James Tartaglia looks at the various ways philosophers have tried to avoid the conclusion that life is meaningless, and in the process have distanced philosophy from the concept of transcendence. Rejecting all of this, Tartaglia embraces nihilism ('we are here with nothing to do'), and uses transcendence both to provide a new solution to the problem of consciousness, and to explain away perplexities about time and universals. He concludes that with more self-awareness, philosophy can attain higher status within a culture increasingly in need of it.

Thinking in Public

Thinking in Public PDF Author: Celucien L. Joseph
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498203817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
Thinking in Public provides a probing and provocative meditation on the intellectual life and legacy of Jacques Roumain. As a work of intellectual history, the book investigates the intersections of religious ideas, secular humanism, and development within the framework of Roumain's public intellectualism and cultural criticism embodied in his prolific writings. The book provides a reconceptualization of Roumain's intellectual itineraries against the backdrop of two public spheres: a national public sphere (Haiti) and a transnational public sphere (the global world). Second, it remaps and reframes Roumain's intellectual circuits and his critical engagements within a wide range of intellectual traditions, cultural and political movements, and philosophical and religious systems. Third, the book argues that Roumain's perspective on religion, social development, and his critiques of religion in general and of institutionalized Christianity in particular were substantially influenced by a Marxist philosophy of history and secular humanist approach to faith and human progress. Finally, the book advances the idea that Roumain's concept of development is linked to the theories of democratic socialism, relational anthropology, distributive justice, and communitarianism. Ultimately, this work demonstrates that Roumain believed that only through effective human solidarity and collaboration can serious social transformation and real human emancipation take place.

The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures

The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures PDF Author: K. Martial Frindéthié
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786492082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This work explores the limits and prospects of Afro-Caribbean Francophone writers in reshaping or producing action-oriented literature. It shows how Francophone literatures have followed a hegemonic discourse that leaves little room for thinking outside of traditional cultural and ideological conventions. Part One explores the origins of Afro-Caribbean Francophone literature and what the author terms "griotism"--a shared heritage of awareness of biological differences, a sense of the black hero as black messiah and black people as chosen, and the promise of a common racial history. Part Two discusses the formidable grip of griotism on Fanon, Mudimbe, the champions of Creolity (Bernabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant), and well-read African women writers (Aminata Sow Fall, and Mariama Ba). Part Three seeks to subvert the discourse of griotism in order to propose a new autonomy for Francophone African writers.