The Foundations Of Africanit Or N Gritude And Arabit

Concentrating on the past, present and future relations of the peoples of Africa and the Arab world this book examines interaction between Arab and African countries; Africa and the Arab-Israeli conflict; Dimensions of Afro-Arab Cooperation. The book concludes with an open discussion on the future of Afro-Arab relations.

Mara A. Leichtman offers an in-depth study of Shi'i Islam in two very different communities in Senegal: the well-established Lebanese diaspora and Senegalese "converts" from Sunni to Shi'i Islam of recent decades. Sharing a minority religious status in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country, each group is cosmopolitan in its own way. Leichtman provides new insights into the everyday lives of Shi'i Muslims in Africa and the dynamics of local and global Islam. She explores the influence of Hizbullah and Islamic reformist movements, and offers a corrective to prevailing views of Sunni-Shi'i hostility, demonstrating that religious coexistence is possible in a context such as Senegal.

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an “insurgent idea” (to invoke this book’s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a “traveling theory” (à la Edward Said’s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois’s discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory. With chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Negritude (Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor), Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Africana Critical Theory endeavors to accessibly offer contemporary critical theorists an intellectual archaeology of the Africana tradition of critical theory and a much-needed dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of black radical politics. These six seminal figures' collective thought and texts clearly cuts across several disciplines and, therefore, closes the chasm between Africana Studies and critical theory, constantly demanding that intellectuals not simply think deep thoughts, develop new theories, and theoretically support radical politics, but be and constantly become political activists, social organizers and cultural workers - that is, folk the Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci referred to as 'organic intellectuals.' In this sense, then, the series of studies gathered in Africana Critical Theory contribute not only to African Studies, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, but also to contemporary critical theoretical discourse across an amazingly wide-range of 'traditional' disciplines, and radical political activism outside of (and, in many instances, absolutely against) Europe's ivory towers and the absurdities of the American academy.

In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.

How/why négritude came to be defined by Aimé Césaire the way it did, including the author’s personal notes from interactions with Léon G. Damas, Aimé Césaire and Leopold S Senghor. (Author’s note: I was carrying Léon G. Damas’s ashes to (French Guyana) Guyane (Damas had been one of the my advisors re Négritude doctoral dissertation.) and was making a stop in Fort de France for Cesaire’s eulogy. Césaire was at the airport to meet me and while waiting for my bags, we exchanged our experiences with the cremation procedures of dear friends. In my case it was that Marietta Damas had had it with people moving her husband and had given me specific directions. One of them was that Damas should not be moved anymore and should be cremated in the massive oak casket (that Houphouet Boigny had bought for her.) In Southeast Washington, DC, the cremation technician, to show me he was following instructions to the letter, opened the door of the oven; then lifted the lid of the casket for me to see that he had moved nothing; even the roses that Marietta had placed on the body were still there. The procedure of cremation had started already and I could see blue flames as though from welding torches shooting everywhere, attacking the body. After a moment of reflection, Césaire, in turn, told me of his exper- ience with Richard Wright and hearing his friend’s bones explode during the procedure. To a reflection regarding what négritude had become at the time of Damas’s death, Césaire gave me a long soliloquy, starting with Paris’s effervescence around the Paris Colonial Exposition back in the 30s and concluding with Sartre’s Black Orpheus. Black Orpheus broke the mold, turning négritude into an aesthetic of literature stripped of socio-political value. The crux of which was that négritude had become another academic subject of post- colonial studies. That was not what Senghor intended. After Black Orpheus, no one could write about négritude without mentioning ontology, epistemology, esthetics, Hegel, integrism and so on. “You heard what I said in Dakar in 66, I don’t like the word négritude. It’s disruptive.” Then too, it bothered him that négritude had gotten disconnected from people’s reality. He then compared that disconnect with what he had witness in Haiti in 1944. The disconnect between the people and the intelligentsia. (Césaire’s interest in Haiti was immense. It was like a duty to visit him whenever I had been to Haiti.) (Author’s note: In 1980 I was the Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in Dakar. Randall Robinson of Trans-Africa was visiting, and I arranged an interview with him for the Dakar daily, Le Soleil. Among subjects discussed was the Western Sahara issue. Robinson explained his support for the Saharawis and the Polisario Front. The interview never ran. Instead, then President Senghor asked me to his office. When he said, “I have a great weakness for France,” he meant it. It made no difference if I saw him everyday. I could never meet him without being taken aback by how much Francité he exuded. But not this time. This time it was a furious Senghor I was meeting. He could not let views inimical to Morocco’s interests in the Senegalese media. He then gave me a long lecture about Arab racism, Morocco excepted. It didn’t help that the slave state of Mauritania right across the Senegal River insisted on an Arab designation. He grew bitter. I was astounded, for no one was more guarded than Senghor. But here he let it rip, perhaps because he was a few months from announcing his retirement. )