Postmodernism Postcoloniality And African Studies

When Kwame Appiah asked the question whether ?post? in ?postcolonial? was the ?post? in ?postmodern,? he challenged the theoretical tenets of both postmodernism and postcolonial studies and opened up a space for a dialogue, which unfortunately, only a handful of scholars have continued. This volume represents an attempt by Africanist scholars to intervene and change the course of current debates, which are being carried out with little or no thought to their applicability or relevance to African studies. The purpose of this study is not merely to present an ?African? version of postcolonial studies or postmodernism or to ?Africanize? their content and theory. Rather, it aims to re-situate these concepts and debates, which are at risk of being colonized by American and European academic provincialism. This collection considers perspectives from West, South, and East Africa as well as the Caribbean. It approaches current debates from the disciplinary perspectives of anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and sociology while dealing with a diverse range of issues including gender, race, ethnicity, and identity.Contributors to this volume include Grant Farred, Olakunle George, Zine Magubane, Alamin Mazrui, Amina Mire, Adlai Murdoch, Tejumola Olaniyan, Joseph Reilly, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza.

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinema—one that requires that we revisit the beginnings of African filmmaking and the critical responses to which they gave rise, and that we ask what limitations they might have contained, what price was paid for the approaches then taken, and whether we are still caught in those limitations today. Using Žižek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodern-based approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practice—one in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive reading of the political and the ideological. The major works of Sembène Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cisse, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno, Bassak ba Kohbio, and Fanta Nacro are explored, while at the same time the project of current postmodern theory, especially that of Jameson, is called into question in order that an African postmodernist cultural enterprise might be envisioned.

Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.

This collection is about composing thought at the level of modernism and decomposing it at the postmodern level where many cocks might crow with African philosophy as a focal point. It has two parts: part one is titled ‘The Journey of Reason in African Philosophy’, and part two is titled ‘African Philosophy and Postmodern Thinking’. There are seven chapters in both parts. Five of the essays are reprinted here as important selections while nine are completely new essays commissioned for this book. As their titles suggest, in part one, African philosophy is unfolded in the manifestation of reason as embedded in modern thought while in part two, it draws the effect of reason as implicated in the postmodern orientation. While part one strikes at what V. Y. Mudimbe calls the “colonising structure” or the Greco-European logo-phallo-euro-centricism in thought, part two bashes the excesses of modernism and partly valorises postmodernism. In some chapters, modernism is presented as an intellectual version of communalism characterised by the cliché: ‘our people say’. Our thinking is that the voice of reason is not the voice of the people but the voice of an individual. The idea of this book is to open new vistas for the discipline of African philosophy. African philosophy is thus presented as a disagreement discourse. Without rivalry of thoughts, Africa will settle for far less. This gives postmodernism an important place, perhaps deservedly more important than history of philosophy allocates to it. It is that philosophical moment that says ‘philosophers must cease speaking like gods in their hegemonic cultural shrines and begin to converse across borders with one another’. In this conversation, the goal for African philosophers must not be to find final answers but to sustain the conversation which alone can extend human reason to its furthermost reaches.

This book likens writers’ incessant focus on racism, negative ethnicity, patriarchy and social stratification in societies to a naïve physician who prescribes analgesics to treat symptoms while the underlying cause of the disease seethes in the blood. In the same way, persons who consistently blame their reckless conduct and shabbiness miss the point if they do not transform the actual cause of the problem: the mind. While most literary scholars problematise gender disparities, racial and political othering, oppression, environment degradation, education matters, poor parenting and governance, they tend to disregard the root cause: modernism. This book finds a gap in this grey area to address the authentic cause of the symptoms that most literary writers and scholars treat. Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, systematisation and rationality, and dualism are at the heart of racism, corruption and other aforementioned symptoms. It is the contention of this study that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.

"Black," "African," "African descendant" and "of African heritage," are just some of the ways Africans and Africans in the diaspora (both old and new) describe themselves. This volume examines concepts of race, ethnicity, and identity as they are ascribed to people of colour around the world, examining different case studies of how the process of identity formation occurred and is changing. Contributors to this volume, selected from a wide range of academic and cultural backgrounds, explore issues that encourage a deeper understanding of race, ethnicity and identity. As our notions about what it means to be black or of African heritage change as a result of globalization, it is important to reassess how these issues are currently developing, and the origins from which these issues developed. Global Africans is an important and insightful book, useful to a wide range of students and scholars, particularly of African studies, sociology, diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.

The Crises of Postcoloniality in Africa is an assemblage of transdisciplinary essays that offer a spirited reflection on the debate and phenomenon of postcoloniality in Africa, including the changing patterns and ramifications of problems, challenges and opportunities associated with it. A key conceptual rhythm that runs through the various chapters of the book is that, far from being demised, postcoloniality is still firmly embedded in Africa, manifesting itself in both blatant and insidious forms. Among the important themes covered in the book include the concepts of postcolonialism, postcoloniality, and neocolonialism; Africa’s precolonial formations and the impact of colonialism; the enduring patterns of colonial legacies in Africa; the persistent contradictions between African indigenous institutions and western versions of modernity; the unravelling of the postcolonial state and issues of armed conflict, conflict intervention and peacebuilding; postcolonial imperialism in Africa and the US-led global war on terror, the historical and postcolonial contexts of gender relations in Africa, as well as pan-Africanism and regionalist approaches to redressing the crises of postcoloniality.

Africa's imagination has been dominated and overshadowed by pressing social and political issues, and its fiction has reflected this. But, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this tendency has been challenged by the rise of experimental fiction. This book examines this fiction and its contribution to the liberation of Africa's imagination.