A Companion To African Rhetoric

A Companion to African Rhetoric, edited by Segun Ige, Gilbert Motsaathebe, and Omedi Ochieng, presents the reader with different perspectives on African rhetoric mostly from Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora. The African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American rhetorician contributors conceptualize African rhetoric, examine African political rhetoric, analyze African rhetoric in literature, and address the connection between rhetoric and religion in Africa. They argue for a holistic view of rhetoric on the continent.

Through a critical analysis of ancient African texts that predate Greco-Roman treatises Cecil Blake revisits the roots of rhetorical theory and challenges what is often advanced as the "darkness metaphor" -- the rhetorical construction of Africa and Africans. Blake offers a thorough examination of Ptah-hotep and core African ethical principles (Maat) and engages rhetorical scholarship within the wider discourse of African development. In so doing, he establishes a direct relationship between rhetoric and development studies in non-western societies and highlights the prospect for applying such principles to ameliorating the development malaise of the continent.

GLOBAL RHETORICAL TRADITIONS is unique in design and scope. It presents, as accessibly as possible, translated primary sources on global rhetorical instruction and practices of Asia, Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, Polynesia, and precolonial Europe. Each of the book’s chapters represents a different rhetorical region and includes a prefatory introduction, critical commentary, translated primary sources, a glossary of rhetorical terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. The general introduction helps contextualize the project, justify its organization and coverage, and draw attention to the various features, characteristics, and/or philosophies of the rhetorics included in the book. The book’s significance lies in its contributions to both studying and teaching global rhetorical traditions by offering representative research methods and primary sources in a single volume. It can be read as scholarship, as reference, and as textbook. BRIEF CONTENTS: Foreword by Patricia Bizzell Renewing Comparative Methodologies by Tarez Samra Graban 1 Arabic and Islamic Rhetorics: Early Islamic, Medieval Islamic, Arabic-Islamic 2 Chinese Rhetorics; Spring-Autumn and Warring States Period (Classical), Han Dynasty, Six Dynasties (Early Medieval), Tang Dynasty, Song Dynasty, and Ming Dynasty, The Modern Period (20th Century) 3 East African Rhetorics: Nilotic 4 Indian and Nepali Rhetorics: Indian-Poetic, Indian-Logical, Hindu 5 Indonesian Rhetorics: Post-National 6 Irish Rhetorics: Medieval Irish-Gaelic (Non-European) 7 Mediterranean Rhetorics: Byzantine, Hebraic Mediterranean 8 Polynesian-Hawaiian Rhetorics: Post-Colonial Hawaiian (Non-European) 9 Russian Rhetorics: Kievan Rus’ Traditions 10 Turkish Rhetorics: Middle Turkish (Central Asia)

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

On African-American Rhetoric traces the arc of strategic language use by African Americans from rhetorical forms such as slave narratives and the spirituals to Black digital expression and contemporary activism. The governing idea is to illustrate the basic call-response process of African-American culture and to demonstrate how this dynamic has been and continues to be central to the language used by African Americans to make collective cultural and political statements. Ranging across genres and disciplines, including rhetorical theory, poetry, fiction, folklore, speeches, music, film, pedagogy, and memes, Gilyard and Banks consider language developments that have occurred both inside and outside of organizations and institutions. Along with paying attention to recent events, this book incorporates discussion of important forerunners who have carried the rhetorical baton. These include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Molefi Asante, Alice Walker, and Geneva Smitherman. Written for students and professionals alike, this book is powerful and instructive regarding the long African-American quest for freedom and dignity.

This book places television in Africa in the digital context. It address the onslaught of multimedia platforms, digital migration and implication of this technology for society. The discussions in the chapters contained in this book encompass a wide range of issues such as digital disruption of television news, internet television and video on demand platforms, adaptations, digital migration, business strategies and management approaches, PBS, consumption patterns, scheduling and programming, evangelical television, and many others. The book is an important reading for academics, students and television practitioners. It offers an insightful view of television in Africa.

This volume of newly commissioned essays provides comprehensive coverage of African philosophy, ranging across disciplines and throughout the ages. Offers a distinctive historical treatment of African philosophy. Covers all the main branches of philosophy as addressed in the African tradition. Includes accounts of pre-colonial African philosophy and contemporary political thought.

This superb book will be a landmark in African studies because the scholars who have undertaken the task of telling their own social sciences, humanities, and literary narratives have displayed a sharp and penetrating engagement with history, politics and culture in such a powerful manner that one cannot read these chapters without claiming them to be the gold standard in contemporary thinking.AARON SMITH, TEMPLE UNIVERSITYWe Will Tell Our Own Story is instructive to scholars and general readers as a method of confronting the manifold problems of misinterpretation and false presentations about African people. I find this work to be extraordinary in conception and execution.SWAHILI SMT, FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF BAHIA, BRAZILWe Will Tell Our Own Story joins a growing number of Afrocentric books that are already revolutionizing the way Africans view themselves and their academies. The creation of a cadre of scholars devoted to truth, rigor, ancestrality, and values is a mark of a mature civilization; these authors are the necessary foundation for further growth.