Law Culture And Africana Studies

Ever since the first contacts between Europe and Africa, African people have been confined to the fringes of Eurocentric experience in the Western mind. Much of what we have studied in African history and culture, or literature and linguistics, or politics and economics, has been orchestrated from the standpoint of Europe's interests. Whether it is a matter of economics, history, politics, geographical concepts, or art, Africans have been seen as peripheral. This volume reviews the past in order to evaluate the present and move ahead with appropriate policies for the future. The authors focus on issues of affirmative action, legal culture, theories of black culture, and methodologies of scholarly work in Africana studies.Contents include: Cecil Blake, ""The Culture Nexus Construct in Africana Studies,"" Ronald Turner, ""On Palatable, Palliative, and Paralytic Affirmative Action, Grutter-Style,"" Winston A. Van Horne, ""Three Concepts of Legitimacy,"" Robert E. Weems, Jr., ""Africana Studies and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment: What Can be Done,"" Ula Y. Taylor, ""Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam: Separatism, Regendering, and a Secular Approach to Black Power after Malcolm X,"" Lewis R. Gordon, ""Must Revolutionaries Sing the Blues? Thinking through Fanon and the Leitmotif of the Black Arts Movement,"" Delores P. Aldridge, ""Race, Gender, and Africana Theorizing,"" and James L. Conyers, ""Biography and Africology: Method and Interpretation."" The volume concludes with reviews of significant recent scholarship on black history and culture.Law, Culture, and Africana Studies will have particular interest for scholars in the fields of American and European studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and specialists in African-American studies.

Ever since the first contacts between Europe and Africa, African people have been confined to the fringes of Eurocentric experience in the Western mind. Much of what we have studied in African history and culture, or literature and linguistics, or politics and economics, has been orchestrated from the standpoint of Europe's interests. Whether it is a matter of economics, history, politics, geographical concepts, or art, Africans have been seen as peripheral. This volume reviews the past in order to evaluate the present and move ahead with appropriate policies for the future. The authors focus on issues of affirmative action, legal culture, theories of black culture, and methodologies of scholarly work in Africana studies.Contents include: Cecil Blake, "The Culture Nexus Construct in Africana Studies," Ronald Turner, "On Palatable, Palliative, and Paralytic Affirmative Action, Grutter-Style," Winston A. Van Horne, "Three Concepts of Legitimacy," Robert E. Weems, Jr., "Africana Studies and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment: What Can be Done," Ula Y. Taylor, "Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam: Separatism, Regendering, and a Secular Approach to Black Power after Malcolm X," Lewis R. Gordon, "Must Revolutionaries Sing the Blues? Thinking through Fanon and the Leitmotif of the Black Arts Movement," Delores P. Aldridge, "Race, Gender, and Africana Theorizing," and James L. Conyers, "Biography and Africology: Method and Interpretation." The volume concludes with reviews of significant recent scholarship on black history and culture.Law, Culture, and Africana Studies will have particular interest for scholars in the fields of American and European studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and specialists in African-American studies.

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

This book presents the diverse, expansive nature of African American Studies and its characteristic interdisciplinarity. It is intended for use with undergraduate/ beginning graduate students in African American Studies, American Studies and Ethnic Studie

What happens to legal thought when key terms-society, culture, power, justice, identity-become unsettled? With the boundaries defining sociolegal scholarship undergoing a profound shift, this book explores the intersections of law, culture, and identity. Sexuality, race, sports, and the politics of policing are among the topics the authors take up as they examine how law both reproduces and challenges fundamental notions of order, discipline, and identity. Contributors: Rosemary J. Coombe, U of Toronto; David M. Engel, SUNY, Buffalo; Marjorie Garber, Harvard U; Herman Gray, UC, Santa Cruz; Rona Tamiko Halualani, San Jos State U; David Harvey, CUNY; Deb Henderson; Yuen J. Huo, UCLA; S. Lily Mendoza, U of Denver; Trish Oberweis, American Justice Institute; Paul A. Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Lisa E. Sanchez, U of Illinois; Carl F. Stychin, U of Reading; Tom R. Tyler, New York U; Christine A. Yalda.

For a long time, Africa has 'lagged' behind global advances in transparency, but there are now significant developments on the continent. In a ground-breaking book, Access to Information in Africa brings together for the first time a collection of African academics and practitioners to contribute to the fast-growing body of scholarship that is now accumulating internationally. This is therefore an African account of progress made and setbacks suffered, but also an account of challenges and obstacles that confront both policy-makers and practitioners. These challenges must be overcome if greater public access to information is to make a distinctive, positive contribution to the continent’s democratic and socio-economic future. This book offers a necessarily multi-dimensional perspective on the state of ATI in African jurisdictions and the emerging, new praxis - a praxis that will entail a genuine domestication of the right of access to information on the continent.

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.