Download or read book Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd written by Nyamnjoh, Francis B. and published by Langaa RPCIG. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded “frontier African” at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.

Download or read book Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd written by B. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africas possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded frontier African at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuolas stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.

Download or read book Incompleteness Donald Trump Populism and Citizenship written by B. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of how Donald J. Trump, his populist credentials notwithstanding, borrows without acknowledgment and stubbornly refuses to come to terms with his indebtedness. Taken together with mobility and conviviality, the principle of incompleteness enables us to distinguish between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism, and when it is fuelled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

Download or read book Eating and Being Eaten written by B. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book is an open invitation to a rich and copious meal of imagination, senses and desires. It argues that cannibalism is practised by all and sundry. In love or in hate, fear or fascination, purposefulness or indifference, individuals, cultures and societies are actively cannibalising and being cannibalised. The underlying message of: Own up to your own cannibalism! is convincingly argued and richly substantiated. The book brilliantly and controversially puts cannibalism at the heart of the self-assured biomedicine, globalising consumerism and voyeuristic social media. It unveils a vast number of prejudices, blind spots and shameful othering. It calls on the reader to consider a morality and an ethics that are carefully negotiated with required sensibility and sensitivity to the fact that no one and no people have the monopoly of cannibalisation and of creative improvisation in the game of cannibalism. The productive, transformative and (re)inventive understanding of cannibalism argued in the book should bring to the fore one of the most vital aspects of what it means to be human in a dynamic world of myriad interconnections and enchantments. To nourish and cherish such a productive form of cannibalism requires not only a compassionate generosity to let in and accommodate the stranger knocking at the door, but also, and more importantly, a deliberate effort to reach in, identify, contemplate, understand, embrace and become intimate with the stranger within us, individuals and societies alike.

Download or read book Environmental Governance in Indonesia written by Annisa Triyanti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book presents the state-of-the-art environmental governance research and practices in Indonesia. It offers a wide scope, covering different sectors (e.g., forestry, mining) and geographical landscapes (e.g., inland and coastal areas). This book engages with existing theories and frameworks, including Earth System Governance, Adaptive and Interactive Governance, among others to trigger a debate regarding the operationalization of such concepts, which are mostly developed for the Global North context. It is also our ambition to incorporate more empirical knowledge from local contexts to indicate research gaps and future directions for environmental governance research agenda to be more diverse, inclusive, and facilitate the incorporation of inter-and transdisciplinary knowledge. This book will be useful for researchers, students, practitioners, and policymakers who are interested in the field of environmental governance, especially in Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the countries with the fastest-growing economies in Asia. Indonesia is rich in natural resources but also suffers from overexploitation and environmental threats exacerbated by climate and human pressures. Along with the growing global ambitions for achieving sustainable development and capacity to adapt to current and future threats, including climate change impacts and disaster risk, Indonesia's commitments to balance development while safeguarding a good environmental status are also increasing. The challenge is on how to govern complex and systemic natural, social and governance systems while adhering to the principle of equity and justice? As it will require more than traditional hierarchical modes of governance and current regulatory instruments (i.e., law and regulations). This is an open access book.

Download or read book Critical Terms for the Study of Africa written by Gaurav Desai and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.

Download or read book Being and Becoming African as a Permanent Work in Progress written by B. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2021-06-09 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a timely addition to debates and explorations on the epistemological relevance of African proverbs, especially with growing calls for the decolonisation of African curricula. The editors and contributors have chosen to reflect on the diverse ways of being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress by drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe's harnessing of the effectualness of oratory, especially his use of proverbs in his works. The book recognises and celebrates the fact that Achebe's proverbial Igbo imaginations of being and becoming African are compelling because they are instructive about the lives, stories, struggles and aspirations of the rainbow of people that make up Africa as a veritable global arena of productive circulations, entanglements and compositeness of being. The contributions foray into how claims to and practices of being and becoming African are steeped in histories of mobilities and a myriad of encounters shaped by and inspiring of the competing and complementary logics of personhood and power that Africans have sought and seek to capture in their repertoires of proverbs. The task of documenting African proverbs and rendering them accessible in the form of a common hard currency with fascinating epistemological possibilities remains a challenge yearning for financial, scholarly, social and political attention. The book is an important contribution to John Mbiti's clarion call for an active and sustained interest in African proverbs.

Download or read book M thod e s written by Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bilingual, French–English journal Méthod(e)s, founded in 2015, is an African initiative with the objective to enlarge the methodological debates on the Global South. The desire for a strong understanding of methodology is to situate it above academic trends, thereby placing it in line with a universal history of the sciences. Just as calling dominant paradigms into question leaves room for creative opportunities, so does the comparison of theoretical approaches and technical models of data collection. Questions related to methods are not purely technical or merely philosophical reflections. The examination of the method used in scientific investigations necessarily leads us to question the validity and consequences of research results. From this point of view, the journal Méthod(e)s is not a forum for simple discussions on the mechanics of research but a tool to question social interests influencing academic research and giving it a political function. It is also intended to lead to a more critical look at the creation of theories dealing with the status of individuals and societies in Africa and the Global South. Méthod(e)s aims to bring into question, connect, and compare the theoretical, technical, and political foundations of the social sciences as applied to human societies. Each contribution is followed by a summary in the respectively other language. In order to ensure a broad intellectual reach, the editors reserve the right to include articles written in other languages. All the abstracts of the papers are also available in Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish.

Download or read book Dynamism in African Languages and Literature written by Keiko Takemura and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2021-03-13 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides novel perspectives towards conceptualisation of African Potentials. It explores diverse and dynamic aspects of linguistic communications in Africa, ranging from convivial multilingual practices to literal and musical arts. The book reflects the diversity and ever-changing dynamism in the African sociolinguistic sphere, that is, metalinguistic discourse in East Africa, sociolinguistic dynamism in Angola, conflict reconciliation speech performed in Ethiopia, and syncretic urban linguistic code called Sheng in Kenya. The volume also explores multi-dimensional relationships between literary arts and the society by investigating such topics as traditional Swahili poetry, publication of children books in Benin, and transformation and reconstruction of Yoruba popular music. The book elucidates dynamic process of creation through mixing of traditional and foreign elements of culture.

Download or read book African Studies in the Academy written by Mawere, Munyaradzi and published by Langaa RPCIG. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time, African Studies as a discipline has been spearheaded by academics and institutions in the Global North. This puts African Studies on the continent at a crossroads of making choices on whether such a discipline can be legitimately accepted as an epistemological discipline seeking objectivity and truth about Africa and the African peoples or a discipline meant to perpetuate the North’s hegemonic socio-economic, political and epistemic control over Africa. The compound question that immediately arises is: Who should produce what and which space should African Studies occupy in the academy both of the North and of the South? Confronted by such a question, one wonders whether the existence of African Studies Centres in the Global North academies open opportunities for critical thinking on Africa or it opens possibilities for the emergence of the same discipline in Africa as a fertile space for trans-disciplinary debate. While approaches critical for the development of African Studies are pervasive in African universities through fields such as cultural studies, social anthropology, history, sociology, indigenous knowledge studies and African philosophy, the discipline of African Studies though critical to Africa is rarely practiced as such in the African academy and its future on the continent remains bleak. African Studies in the Academy is a testimony that if honestly and objectively practiced, the crossroads position of African Studies as a discipline makes it a fertile ground for generating and testing new approaches critical for researching and understanding Africa. It also challenges Africa to seriously consider assuming its legitimate position to champion African Studies from within. These issues are at the heart of the present volume.

Download or read book Epistemic Freedom in Africa written by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book Bouncing Back written by Tamara Enomoto and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2018 South Africa's so-called "mother city", Cape Town came into the global spotlight as being the first city in the world to (almost) "run out of water," a crisis that only exacerbated the pressures placed upon a population staggering under socio-economic and politically-tinged environmental predicaments. Japan on the other hand has long sustained an international reputation for the massive scale of natural and anthropocentric crises its people have faced, overcome, and succumbed to. The most recent (pre-Pandemic) occurrence of which being the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiima nuclear plant accident. What comes to mind when Japan, South Africa, and the notion of resilience are mentioned in the same utterance? Well, considering how societies respond to disaster, (man-made and natural), Japan and South Africa feature high on many lists both for our triumphs and our failures to account for the most vulnerable among us in moments of catastrophe. This edited volume draws on transdisciplinary perspectives and multi-sited research to reflect on the high stakes involved when people are expected to repeatedly survive crisis. The authors take "resilience" as a contested yet generative lens through which to examine some of the most salient questions of our time. Culled from two seemingly disparate geopolitical locales, the insights offered here are hauntingly connected, shedding light on questions of collective and individual responses to calamity - questions that, in the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic, are now urgently being grappled with by everyone, everywhere.

Download or read book Yearning for Dis Connections written by Hassan Yosimbom and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom uses the works of Nyamnjoh, Ndi, Besong and Takwi to explore how Cameroonian worlds are on the move of and for identity negotiations. He also explores how the uneven development of those Cameroonian worlds has been creating growing gaps within and among regions while at the same time Francophonising Anglophones and Anglophonising Francophones through four-fold processes of complementarities, continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. The book demonstrates that persistent Francophone hegemony and resurgent Anglophone nationalism often fail to realise that all Cameroonians have been shuffled like a pack of cards; that cultures are formed through complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures; that the boundaries of cultures are fluid, porous and contested; that identities are multiple and layered in complex, pluralist democratic societies; and that there is need for public recognition of cultural and identity specificities in ways that do not deny their fluidity, nimbleness and incompleteness.

Download or read book Speculative Science Fiction written by Ernest N. Emenyonu and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the writing of African and African diaspora speculative and science fiction writing. Discussions around the 'rise' of science-fiction and fantasy have led to a push-back by writers and scholars who have suggested that this is not a new phenomenon in African literature. This collection focuses on the need to recalibrate ways of reading and categorising this grenre of African writing through critical examinations both of classics such as Kojo Laing's Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's oeuvre, as well as more recent fiction from writers including Nnedi Okorafor, Namwali Serpell and Masande Ntshanga."--Back cover.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies written by Sharlene Swartz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ninety percent of the world's youth live in Africa, Latin America and the developing countries of Asia. Despite this, the field of Youth Studies, like many others, is dominated by the knowledge economy of the Global North. To address these geo-political inequalities of knowledge, The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies offers a contribution from Southern scholars to remake Youth Studies from its current state, that universalises Northern perspectives, into a truly Global Youth Studies. Contributors from across various regions of the Global South, including from the Diaspora, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities, locate and define the Global South, articulate the necessity of studying Southern lives to enrich, re-interpret, legitimate and offer symmetry to Youth Studies, and utilize and innovate Southern theory to do so. Eleven concepts are re-imagined and re-presented throughout the Handbook--personhood, intersectionality, violences, de- and post-coloniality, consciousness, precarity, fluid modernities, ontological insecurity, navigational capacities, collective agency and emancipation. The outcome is a series of everyday practices such as hustling, navigating, fixing, waiting, being on standby, silence, and life-writing, that demonstrate how youth living in adversity experiment with and push back against routine and conformity, and how research may support them in these endeavors and, simultaneously, redefine the relationships between knowledge, practice and politics-what the volume editors term epistepraxis. The Handbook concludes with a nascent charter for a Global Youth Studies of benefit to the world, that no longer excludes, assumes or elides but rather includes new possibilities for representing youth, researching amongst them, and devising policies and interventions to better serve them. This volume is a critical addition to the field of Youth Studies and one that should be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students working in this area in both the Global North and South.

Download or read book Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts written by Dirk Wiemann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers). The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.

Download or read book Language and Decolonisation written by Finex Ndhlovu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and Decolonisation is the first collection to bring together views from across scholarly communities that are committed to the agenda of decolonising knowledge in language study. Edited by leading figures in the field, the chapters offer new insights on how ‘decolonising’ can be adopted as a methodology for charting the next steps in solving practical language-related problems in educational and related social policy areas. Divided into two sections, the book covers the coloniality of language, the materiality of culture and colonial scripts, the decolonisation imperative, multilingualism discourse and decolonisation, and decolonising languages in public discourse. With 20 chapters authored by experts from across the globe, this pioneering collection is an essential reference and resource for advanced students, scholars, and researchers of language and culture, sociolinguistics, decolonial studies, racial studies, and related areas.