Download or read book Marxism and Freedom written by Raya Dunayevskaya and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic exposition of Marxist thought, Raya Dunayevskaya, with clarity and great insight, traces the development and explains the essential features of Marx's analysis of history. Using as her point of departure the Industrial and French Revolutions, the European upheavals of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune of 1871, Dunayevskaya shows how Marx, inspired by these events, adapted Hegel's philosophy to analyze the course of history as a dialectical process that moves "from practice to theory." The essence of Marx's philosophy, as Dunayevskaya points out, is the human struggle for freedom, which entails the gradual emergence of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness and the discovery through conflict of the means for realizing complete human freedom. But freedom for Marx meant freedom not only from capitalist economic exploitation but also from all political restraints. Continuing her historical analysis, Dunayevskaya reveals how completely Marx's original conception of freedom was perverted through its adaptations by Stalin in Russia and Mao in China, and the subsequent erection of totalitarian states. The exploitation of the masses persisted under these regimes in the form of a new "state capitalism." Yet despite the profound derailment of Marxist political philosophy in the twentieth century, Dunayevskaya points to developments such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956, and the Civil Rights struggles in the United States as signs that the indomitable quest for freedom on the part of the downtrodden cannot be forever repressed. The Hegelian dialectic of events propelled by the spirit of the masses thus moves on inexorably with the hope for the future achievement of political, economic, and social freedom and equality for all.

Download or read book Mozambique on the Move written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being a first of its kind, this volume comprises a multi-disciplinary exploration of Mozambique’s contemporary and historical dynamics, bringing together scholars from across the globe. Focusing on the country’s vibrant cultural, political, economic and social world – including the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era – the book argues that Mozambique is a country still emergent, still unfolding, still on the move. Drawing on the disciplines of history, literature studies, anthropology, political science, economy and art history, the book serves not only as a generous introduction to Mozambique but also as a case study of a southern African country. Contributors are: Signe Arnfred, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, José Luís Cabaço, Ana Bénard da Costa, Anna Maria Gentili, Ana Margarida Fonseca, Randi Kaarhus, Sheila Pereira Khan, Maria Paula Meneses, Lia Quartapelle, Amy Schwartzott, Leonor Simas-Almeida, Anne Sletsjøe, Sandra Sousa, Linda van de Kamp.

Download or read book The World Republic of Letters written by Pascale Casanova and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.

Download or read book State Ideology and Language in Tanzania written by Jan Blommaert and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a thoroughly revised version of the 1999 edition, which was welcomed at the time as a classic. It now extends the period of coverage to 2012 and includes an entirely new chapter on current developments, making this updated edition an essentia

Download or read book The Demise of the Inhuman written by Ana Monteiro-Ferreira and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employs a critical Afrocentric reading of Western constructions of knowledge so as to overcome the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity. Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the “infrastructures of dominance and privilege,” arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early

Download or read book African Political Thought written by Guy Martin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of its history, the African continent has witnessed momentous political change, remarkable philosophical innovation, and the complex cross-fertilization of ideologies and belief systems. This definitive study surveys the concepts, values, and historical upheavals that have shaped African political systems from the ancient period to the postcolonial era and beyond. Beginning with the emergence of indigenous political institutions, it traces the most important developments in African history, including the Africanization of Islam, liberal democratic movements, socialism, Pan-Africanism, and Africanist-Populist resistance to the neoliberal world order. The result is an invaluable resource on a region too often ignored in the history of political thought.

Download or read book Africana Critical Theory written by Reiland Rabaka and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Trial of Dedan Kimathi written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kenyan-born novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo, have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character, Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment. Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”

Download or read book Literary Theory written by Johannes Willem Bertens and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible guide provides the ideal first step in understanding literary theory.

Download or read book The Decolonial Mandela written by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Decolonial Mandela -- The Decolonial Mandela - Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life - Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction - The Mandela Phenomenon as Decolonial Humanism -- One - Decolonial Theory of Life -- Two - Mandela: Different Lives in One -- Three - Mandela at Codesa, and New Conceptions of Justice -- Epilogue - In Search of a Paradigm of Peace -- References -- Index

Download or read book Reflections on Exile and Other Essays written by Edward W. Said and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.

Download or read book Fanon s Dialectic of Experience written by Ato Sekyi-Otu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London

Download or read book Decolonizing Methodologies written by Linda Tuhiwai Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

Download or read book Britain France and the Decolonization of Africa written by Andrew W.M. Smith and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

Download or read book Consciencism written by Kwame Nkrumah and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciencism Philosophy and Ideology for de-colonisation Kwame Nkrumah Kwame Nkrumah here sets out his personal philosophy,

Download or read book Culture and Imperialism written by Edward W. Said and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

Download or read book Fanonian Practices in South Africa written by F. Fanon and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Frantz Fanon's relevance to contemporary South African politics and by extension research on postcolonial Africa and the tragic development of postcolonies. Scholar Nigel C. Gibson offers theoretically informed historical analysis, providing insights into the circumstances that led to the current hegemony of neoliberalism in South Africa.