Contextualizing Indigenous Knowledge In Africa And Its Diaspora

This volume proposes a wholesale adoption of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) as a paradigm for Africa's renewal and freedom from the whims of foreign interests. These systems, as argued here, involve balancing short-term thinking and immediate gratification with longer-term planning for future generations of Africans and the continent's diaspora. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with development studies in Africa and its diaspora, as it offers plausible solutions to Africa's chronic developmental problems that can only be provided from within Africa, rather than through the intervention of external third parties. As such, it provides vital contributions to the ongoing search for viable answers to the challenges that Africa faces today.

Expressions of Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Africa and its Diaspora provides critical discourses on Africa and the various configurations of its reflections in folklore, literature, music, languages, and philosophy. The collection, through its selected works, focuses on the African continent in terms of preserving the unique identity of African Indigenous and Local Knowledge. In reality, this preservation effort is confronted by a number of challenges within today’s increasingly globalized and westernized world. This book documents ongoing scholarly discussion on the paradoxical dynamics of preserving this identity and consequently enhancing the relevance of African Indigenous and Local Knowledge. This volume articulates the representation of knowledge and values lodged in the diverse knowledge systems in Africa and its diaspora, and which are constantly expressed in local and global spaces. It highlights the prejudicial assessment of African Indigenous knowledge systems that has ensured that Western epistemological systems are internationally recognized and supported while African epistemological systems are denigrated, discouraged or simply ignored, even on the African continent. Given that the term expressions entails making something known or manifest, this edited collection is assembled to make known some of the elements of indigenous and local knowledge, as well as the practices that these elements necessitate both historically and contemporarily in the African situation.

This edited volume presents intersectionality in its various configurations and interconnections across the African continent and around the world as a concept. These chapters identify and discuss intersectionalities of identity and their interplay within precolonial, colonial, and neo-colonial constructs that develop unique and often conflicting interconnections. Scholars in this book address issues in cultural, feminist, Pan African, and postcolonial studies from interdisciplinary and traditional disciplines, including the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. While Intersectionality as a framework for race, gender, and class is often applied in African-American studies, there is a dearth of work in its application to Africa and the Diaspora. This book presents a diverse set of chapters that compare, contrast, and complicate identity constructions within Africa and the Diaspora utilizing the social sciences, the arts in film and fashion, and political economies to analyze and highlight often invisible distinctions of African identity and the resulting lived experiences. These chapters provide a discussion of intersectionality’s role in understanding Africa and the Diaspora and the intricate interconnections across its people, places, history, present, and future.

This book considers how the establishment and/or improvement of gender equality impacts on the social, economic, religious, cultural, environmental and political developments of human societies in Africa and its Diaspora. An interdisciplinary team of contributors examine the role of gender in development against the background of Africa’s convoluted and arduous history of state formation, slavery, colonialism, post-independence, nation-building and poverty. Each chapter highlights and stimulates further discussion on the struggles that many African and African Diaspora societies grapple with in the perplexing issue of gender and development - concentrating on gains that have been made and the challenges yet to be surmounted.

This book examines the intersection between cultural identities and development in African and the Diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives. Starting with the premise that culture is one of the most significant factors in development, the book examines diverse topics such as the migrations of musical forms, social media, bilingualism and religion. Foregrounding the work of Africa based scholars, the book presents strategies for identifying solutions to the challenges facing African culture and development. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African Studies and African Culture and Society.

This book argues that ancient and modern African indigenous knowledges remain key to Africa’s role in global capital, technological and knowledge development and to addressing her marginality and postcoloniality. The contributors engage the unresolved problematics of the historical and contemporary linkages between African knowledges and the African academy, and between African and global knowledges. The book relies on historical and comparative political analysis to explore the global context for the application of indigenous knowledges for tackling postcolonial challenges of knowledge production, conflict and migration, and women’s rights on the continent in transcontinental African contexts. Asserting the enduring potency of African indigenous knowledges for the transformation of policy, the African academy and the study of Africa in the global academy, this book will be of interest to scholars of African Studies, postcolonial studies and decolonisation and global affairs.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion interrogates and presents robust and comprehensive contributions from interdisciplinary experts and scholars. Offering a range of perspectives and opinions through the prism of understanding the past about African Traditional religions and, more importantly, capturing their dynamics in the present and projecting their sustainability and relevance for the future, this volume is an essential resource for knowledge and understanding of African Traditional religions in the global space of religious traditions.

At the turn of the 20th century, African societies witnessed the suppression of indigenous healing specialists as missionary proselytization and colonial rule increased. Governments, medical practitioners and academics focused little attention or resources on the production of "traditional" medicine, despite its potential use for advancing health care delivery to millions of people in rural communities and providing the basis for a medicinal industry. Focusing on the case of Ghana, Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Societyinvestigates the ways in which healers and indigenous archives of cultural knowledge conceptualize and interpret medicine and healing. In order to unearth these prevailing concepts, Konadu utilizes in-depth interviews, plant samples, material culture, linguistics, and other sources. This groundbreaking study of indigenous knowledge has important implications for the study of medical and knowledge systems in Africa and the African Diaspora worldwide. By closely examining a range of multidisciplinary sources and utilizing fieldwork in the Takyiman district of central Ghana, the book contributes a new dimension to the study of health and healing systems in the African context and offers scholars, students, and general readers a vital reference.