Download or read book Modernity and Its Malcontents written by Jean Comaroff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called "traditional" cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where "modernity" has failed to deliver on its promises? Some of the essays in Modernity and Its Malcontents address familiar anthropological issues—like witchcraft, myth, and the politics of reproduction—but treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly nontraditional subjects—among them the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Niger—in such a way as to confront the conceptual limits of Western social science. Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfuly mobilized in the making of history, present, and future. Addressing challenges posed by contemporary African realities, the authors subject such concepts as modernity, ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny. Writing about a variety of phenomena, they are united by a wish to preserve the diversity and historical specificity of local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the historical anthropology of Africa. The contributors, all from the Africanist circle at the University of Chicago, are Adeline Masquelier, Deborah Kaspin, J. Lorand Matory, Ralph A. Austen, Andrew Apter, Misty L. Bastian, Mark Auslander, and Pamela G. Schmoll.

Download or read book Postcolonial Modernism written by Chika Okeke-Agulu and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.

Download or read book Modernization as Spectacle in Africa written by Peter J. Bloom and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.

Download or read book Tradition and Modernity written by Kwame Gyekye and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times, and shows how Western philosophical concepts help in addressing a wide range of specifically African problems.

Download or read book African Postcolonial Modernity written by S. Osha and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African cultures and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world, critiquing universalist notions of democratization.

Download or read book Olive Schreiner and African Modernism written by Jade Munslow Ong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods, places, and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor, postcolonialism, and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures, in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner’s three novels, Undine, The Story of An African Farm, and From Man to Man, in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors, in whose writings the impact of Schreiner’s politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Zoe Wicomb, amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies, ecocriticism, and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender, race, empire, and modernism.

Download or read book African Modernism written by Manuel Herz and published by . This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the most comprehensive survey of modern architecture in Africa to date. When the first edition of African Modernism was published in 2015, it was received with international praise and has been sought after constantly ever since it went out of print in 2018. Marking Park Books' 10th anniversary, this landmark book becomes available again in a new edition. In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book's first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.

Download or read book The Modernity of Witchcraft written by Peter Geschiere and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many Westerners, the disappearance of African traditions of witchcraft might seem inevitable wuth continued modernization. In The Modernity of Witchcraft, Peter Geschieres uses his own experiences among the Maka and in other parts of eastern and southern Cameroon, as well as other anthropological research, to argue that contemporary ideas and practices of witchcraft are more a response to modern exigencies than a lingering cultural custom. The prevalence of witchcraft, especially in African politics and entrepreneurship, demonstrates the unlikely balance it has achieved with the forces of modernity. Geshiere explores why modern techniques and commodities, usually of Western Provenance, have become central in rumors of the occult.

Download or read book State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa written by Tejumola Olaniyan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the state impacted culture and cultural production in Africa? How has culture challenged and transformed the state and our understandings of its nature, functions, and legitimacy? Compelled by complex realities on the ground as well as interdisciplinary scholarly debates on the state-culture dynamic, senior scholars and emerging voices examine the intersections of the state, culture, and politics in postcolonial Africa in this lively and wide-ranging volume. The coverage here is continental and topics include literature, politics, philosophy, music, religion, theatre, film, television, sports, child trafficking, journalism, city planning, and architecture. Together, the essays provide an energetic and nuanced portrait of the cultural forms of politics and the political forms of culture in contemporary Africa.

Download or read book Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria written by Ousmane Kane and published by Brill Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2003-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with Muslim modernity in a country with the largest single Muslim population in Sub-Saharan Africa. It provides much needed new grounds for comparative study. Until now, virtually all socio-anthropological works about any specific African country are either authored by nationals of that country or by Western scholars. This book is an exception because its author is an Islamicist and a social scientist from Senegal trained in the French social science tradition. Therefore, his work does offer an original perspective in the study of Nigeria. In addition, the study of Islam south of the Sahara has so far focused on Sufi orders, which form the mainstream of Islam, but which by no means, covers the whole Islamic field; socalled Islamic fundamentalist movements are also part of the religious landscape. This book is devoted to the study of the largest single Muslim fundamentalist organization in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa, the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition.

Download or read book Singing the Law written by Peter Leman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book African Languages Literatures and Postcolonial Modernity written by Samba Camara and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora. It foregrounds the notion of postcolonial modernity in reference to modernization as experienced in the postcolony and its contemporary legacies, and investigates how African languages and literatures, both as means of communication and as instruments of cultural agency, have embodied and mediated modernity. Each chapter grapples with the literary or linguistic dimensions of postcolonial modernity as portrayed in African novels, film, poetry or popular music or as embodied in African and Afro-diasporic languages and dialects. The chapters also reveal how literature and language, respectively, document and embody discourses, phenomena, histories, ideologies, and beliefs that resulted from the legacies of colonialism.

Download or read book Africa Must Be Modern written by Olúfémi Táíwò and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a forthright and uncompromising manner, Olúfémi Táíwò explores Africa's hostility toward modernity and how that hostility has impeded economic development and social and political transformation. What has to change for Africa to be able to respond to the challenges of modernity and globalization? Táíwò insists that Africa can renew itself only by fully engaging with democracy and capitalism and by mining its untapped intellectual resources. While many may not agree with Táíwò's positions, they will be unable to ignore what he says. This is a bold exhortation for Africa to come into the 21st century.

Download or read book Politics and Post Colonial Theory written by Pal Ahluwalia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book makes sense of the complexities and dynamics of post-colonial politics, illustrating how post-colonial theory has marginalised a huge part of its constituency, namely Africa. Politics and Post-Colonial Theory traces how African identity has been constituted and reconstituted by examining issues such as: * negritude * the rise of nationalism * decolonisation. The book also questions how helpful post-colonial analysis can be in understanding the complexities which define institutions including: * the nation-state * civil society * human rights * citizenship. Politics and Post-colonial Theory bravely breaks down disciplinary boundaries. Its radical vision will be essential reading for all those engaged in Politics, post-colonial studies and African studies.

Download or read book Relocating Agency written by Olakunle George and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Combining a sustained critical engagement of Anglo-American theory with focused close-readings of major African writers, this book performs a long-overdue cross-fertilization of ideas among poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and African literature. The author examines several influential figures in current theory such as Habermas, Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe, as well as the theorists of postcolonialism, and offers an extended reading of the Nigerian writers D.O. Fagunwa, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe. He argues that contrary to what the purism and voluntarism common to postcolonial theory might suggest, one lesson of African letters is that significant agency can result from acts that are blind to their determinations. For George, African letters offer an instance of "agency-in-motion," as opposed to agency in theory.

Download or read book Magical Interpretations Material Realities written by Henrietta L. Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Magical Interpretations, Material Realities brings together many of today's best scholars of contemporary Africa. The theme of "witchcraft" has long been associated with exoticizing portraits of a "traditional" Africa, but this volume takes the question of occult as a point of entry into the moral politics of some very modern African realities.' - James Ferguson, University of California, USA 'These essays bear eloquent testimony to the ongoing presence and power of the occult imaginary, and of the intimate connection between global capitalism and local cosmology, in postcolonial Africa. A major contribution to scholarship that aims to rework the divide between modernity and tradition.' - Charles Piot, Duke University, USA This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to variations in meanings and practices. It examines the way different people in different contexts are making sense of what 'witchcraft' is and what it might mean. Using recent ethnographic materials from across the continent, the volume explores how witchcraft articulates with particular modern settings for example: the State in Cameroon; Pentecostalism in Malawi; the university system in Nigeria and the IMF in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The editors provide a timely overview and reconsideration of long-standing anthropological debates about 'African witchcraft', while simultaneously raising broader concerns about the theories of the western social sciences.

Download or read book Engaging Modernity written by Ousseina D. Alidou and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seizing the space opened by the early 1990s democratization movement, Muslim women are carving an active, influential, but often-overlooked role for themselves during a time of great change. Engaging Modernity provides a compelling portrait of Muslim women in Niger as they confronted the challenges and opportunities of the late twentieth century. Based on thorough scholarly research and extensive fieldwork—including a wealth of interviews—Ousseina Alidou’s work offers insights into the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger. Mixing biography with sociological data, social theory and linguistic analysis, this is a multilayered vision of political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath. Alidou offers a gripping look at one of the Muslim world’s most powerful untold stories. Runner-up, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association, 2007