Thinking From The Underside Of History

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds to these essays.

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics and evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others. This anthology of articles by US philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives.

This book is a political and theological reflection on the violence and injustice that has taken place in Mexico and Central America since 2006 as a result of the drug war. In order to understand and respond to this conflict in the age of globalization, William A. Walker III combines the work of philosopher Enrique Dussel and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar to develop a theology of the drug war that transcends both a Eurocentric conception of the world and a merely political account of salvation. Walker also highlights examples of Christian and church-based approaches to practicing neighborliness and resistance to drug trade-related violence, challenging both Christians and non-Christians to participate in the creation of a more just and merciful society.

Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles by leading scholars puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely philosophy or theory of human rights, history, and constitutional and international law. This book combines critical consciousness and moral sensibility, and offers methods of interpretation or hermeneutical strategies to advance the project of decolonizing human rights, a veritable tool-box to create new Third-World discourses of human rights.

What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities by Charles Ngwena 2018 ISBN: 978-1-920538-82-8 Pages: 306 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available About the publication What is Africanness: Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, by Charles Ngwena, Professor of Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, is a peer-reviewed monograph aiming to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation in and beyond South Africa about who is African and what is African. It aims to implicate a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’) by showing its teleology and effects; and offers an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. The book develops an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africanness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. It interrogates the making of Africa in colonial discourses and the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within. The arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity by addressing an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. The book develops an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings. Comments Charles Ngwena’s timely and original book is a wonderful read, rich in theory and insight, and an essential companion for those interested in exploring the ‘multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities’ that constitute the diversity of ‘Africanness’ and African identities. – Professor Cathi Albertyn, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Editor, South African Journal on Human Rights This is a brilliant exploration of liberating and affirming ways to speak of African identities and sexualities, reminding us there can be creative beauty where pain and dispossession have resided. – Rudo Chigudu, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria This is a masterpiece! Not only does the author capture the discourse and debates on “Africanness”, he aptly examines them before offering his views on “decentring the race of Africanness” with the important recognition of “Africa as land of diverse identifications”. – Prof Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE DEDICATION PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS 1. INTRODUCING THE ‘MANYNESS’ OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction 2 Nativism 2.1 Theocratic vision 2.2 Logic of identity 3 Reformulating African identity: Overcoming status subordination and achieving inclusive equality 4 Scope and structure of the book: A broad triangulation of race, culture and sexualities 4.1 Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogeneous Africanness 4.2 Part 2: Africanness, race and culture 4.3 Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities 2. HERMENEUTICS OF AFRICANNESS: BUILDING ON STUART HALL’S CULTURAL THEORY OF IDENTIFICATIONS 1 Introduction 2 Connecting inclusive equality with a deconstructive hermeneutics of Africanness 3 Who/what is African?: A central discursive question 4 Hall’s cultural theory of identity as enunciation 4.1 Identity as becoming and being 4.2 Implications of a Hallian approach for conceptualising Africanness 4.2.1 Transposing Hall’s theory to Africanness as broad cultural and racial identifications 4.2.2 Transposing Hall’s theory onto African sexuality identifications 5 Positionality PART 2: AFRICANNESS, RACE AND CULTURE 3. WHAT’S IN A NAME? THE NAMING OF AFRICA AND AFRICANS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RADICAL CULTURAL ALTERITY 1 Introduction: Representation, truth, knowledge and power 2 Naming of Africa 2.1 Provenance of the naming 3 Naming of Africans: Epochal re-description 3.1 Africa at the edge of time: The founding of alterity in anachronistic space 3.2 Africa as land of cultural otherness: A leaf from Mudimbe’s The invention of Africa 3.2.1 Christianity and the production of African spiritual alterity 3.2.2 Anthropology and the production of African cultural alterity 4 Mudimbe’s contribution to dialogic Africanness 4. AFRICA AS LAND OF RACIAL OTHERNESS 1 Introduction 2 The contribution of philosophy and science to the construction of African racial alterity 2.1 Philosophy 2.2 Science 3 Re-membering Saartjie Baartman: Black embodiment, ascribed identity and fetishisation 3.1 Logic of identity 3.2 Fetishisation 4 Apartheid and the banality of race 4.1 Creating ‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Whites’ 4.1.1 ‘Africans’ and ‘Whites’ as extreme polarities 4.1.2 ‘Coloureds’ 4.1.3 ‘Indians’ 4.2 Racial positioning among inferiorised ‘races’ 4.3 Apartheid as not so much about apartness but baasskapism 5 Ode to an open Africanness 5. DECENTRING THE RACE OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction: putting race under erasure 2 Recalling Hall’s deconstructive identification template 3 Decentring the race of Africanness 3.1 Appiah’s In my father’s house 3.2 Blyden’s black personality 4 Retaining the political salience of race 4.1 Afropolitanism 5 Africa as space for diverse identifications and recognition of ever-evolving ethnicities PART 3: HETEROGENEOUS SEXUALITIES 6. REPRESENTING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHOUT 1 Introduction 2 Said’s discourse of orientalism 2.1 Orientalism and Said’s aporias 2.1.1 Hybridity: Breaking with coloniser/ colonised binary 3 Nativising African peoples 4 Mamdani’s discourse of nativism 5 Nativism and the construction of colonial whiteness 5.1 Compulsory whiteness and regulation of sexualities 6 Nativising black men’s sexuality 6.1 Southern Rhodesia and the phantom of the ‘black peril’ 7 Black women’s sexual degeneracy and colonial continuities in Caldwell et al: A performative study of African women 7. ‘TRANSGRESSIVE’ SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHIN AND OVERCOMING STATUS SUBORDINATION 1 Introduction 1.1 Proclaiming heterosexuality and castigating homosexuality 1.2 Democratising sexuality 2 Discursive clarifications 2.1 Transgressive sexualities: the terminological rationale 2.2 Overcoming status subordination 2.3 Avoiding LGBTI essentialism 2.4 Avoiding unproductive LGBTI anti-essentialism 2.5 Remaining conscious of colonising sexuality knowledge 3 Deconstructing sexualities 3.1 Essentialist social construction 3.2 Transformative social construction 3.3 Deconstructing the relationship between sexuality and gender: Drawing on Richardson’s analytic template 3.3.1 Naturalist approach 3.3.2 Prioritising gender over sexuality 3.3.3 Gender as an effect of sexuality 3.3.4 Sex and gender as separate, non-deterministic, historically and culturally situated systems 3.3.5 Sexuality and gender elision 4 Way forward 8. MEDIATING CONFLICTING SEXUALITY IDENTIFICATIONS THROUGH POLITICS AND AN ETHICS OF PLURALISM 1 Introduction 2 Rawls’ overlapping consensus 3 Rescher’s dissensus management approach 4 Young’s critique of the ideal of impartiality and the civic public 5 Arendt’s concept of citizenship in a plural political community 6 Finding an overlapping consensus and asymmetrical reciprocity in African political and constitutional frameworks EPILOGUE: THEORISING AFRICANNESS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines-nationalist, Marxist, and religious-and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions and various Arab concerns.

The emergence of the 'Third World' is generally traced to onset of the Cold War and decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s the "three worlds of development" were central to the wider dynamics of the changing international order. By the 1980s, Third Worldism had peaked entering a period of dramatic decline that paralleled the end of the Cold War. Into the 21st century, the idea of a Third World and even the pursuit of some form of Third Worldism has continued to be advocated and debated. For some it has passed into history, and may never have had as much substance as it was credited with, while others seek to retain or recuperate the Third World and give Third Worldism contemporary relevance. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction this edited volume brings together a wide range of important contributions. Collectively they offer a powerful overview from a variety of angles of the history and contemporary significance of Third Worldism in international affairs. The question remains; did the Third World exist, what was it, does it still have intellectual and political purchase or do we live in a global era that can be described as After the Third World? This book was previously published as a special issue of Third world Quarterly.

Enrique Dussel is Latin America’s foremost philosopher, renowned for his contributions to ethics, political philosophy, and liberation theology. Designed for classroom use, this collection of essays engages with Dussel’s encyclopedic work, making his valuable contributions accessible to English-speaking students. In addition to being one of the most original, prolific, and widely known members of the Latin American Philosophy of Liberation movement, Dussel has also made important contributions to world philosophy, the history of philosophy, the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and the understanding of Karl Marx. Dussel famously engaged in a decade-long debate with Karl-Otto Apel on the relationship between material and formal ethics—that is, between an ethics of the community of life and an ethics of the community of discourse—and he has produced novel interpretations and analyses of the concepts of alterity, exteriority, the other, and the world history of ethical systems. Most recently, Dussel extended his work on an ethics of liberation into a politics of liberation, developed over the course of three published volumes. In this book, scholars from around the world assess Dussel’s work in ways that are both appreciative and critical. Two essays by Dussel bookend the volume: the collection opens with a consideration of the (im)possibility of multiple modernities and ends with an autobiographical trajectory of the philosopher’s thinking. In addition to Dussel and the editors, the contributors to this volume include Linda Martín Alcoff, Don Thomas Deere, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Mario Sáenz Rovner, Alejandro A. Vallega, and Jorge Zúñiga M.