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Ubuntu is an African philosophical tradition that embodies the ability of one human being to empathize with another. It is the quintessence of African humanism, communalism, and belonging. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu anticipated, Ubuntu resonated with the moral intuition of the majority of black South Africans in the 1990s. As a result, it became the foundational ethical basis for articulating a new post-apartheid era of reconciliation and forgiveness in the face of a history marked by brutal racial violence. Yet Ubuntu, as a philosophy or ethical practice which has arguably come to represent African humanism and communalism, has not been sufficiently assimilated into contemporary philosophical scholarship. This anthology weaves interdisciplinary perspectives into the discourse on African relational ethics in dialogue with Western normative ideals across a wide range of issues, including justice, sustainable development, musical culture, journalism, and peace. It explains the philosophy of Ubuntu to both African and non-African scholars. Comprehensively written, this book will appeal to a broad audience of academic and non-academic readers.
Developing Africa? New Horizons with Afrocentricity aims to contest the Eurocentric narrative of an African development discourse. This book deploys the theory of Afrocentricity as an intellectual standpoint from which African thinkers should interrogate and reconceptualize the discourse of development in Africa. Particularly, the book argues in favour of the Afrocentric re-interpretation of African history, African culture and assertion of African agency as the core building wedge in the reconceptualization of the ideal African development trajectory.
In answering the question of life’s meaning, the African perspective is only just beginning to emerge. While this is true, a critical examination of African theories of meaningfulness, the possibility of life’s meaninglessness, as well as ideas about the proper mode/mood for living with the meaninglessness of life are largely underexplored within the African philosophical tradition. This book provides several plausible accounts of meaning in/of life from an African perspective, examines the relationship between death and life’s meaningfulness, and explores the possibility of life’s meaninglessness, proposing the “philosophy of indifference” as the proper mode/mood for living with the meaninglessness of life.
Cultural Texts of Resistance in Zimbabwe explores how ordinary citizens appropriate and deploy cultural texts such as internet memes, songs, political cartoons and social media discussions as vehicles to contest hegemonic narratives of the state and insert alternative ways of imagining the future of the nation. This book is a timely attempt to examine the multiple and complex dimensions of resistance in post-millennial Zimbabwe through analysing different cultural productions. It centres the voices of ordinary Zimbabweans by examining popular cultural texts that reflect their experiences and ways of living within the Zimbabwean crisis of the post-2000 period. The book argues that subversive cultural texts have become important tools that ordinary citizens appropriate to challenge the repressive political environment and imagine different ways of writing the nation. The book brings a fresh perspective to ongoing discussions on how popular cultural texts contribute to the narration of the nation, especially in the context of crisis.
This book fills a gap in the literature as it uniquely approaches onomastics from the perspective of both anthropology and linguistics. It addresses names and cultures from 16 countries and five continents, thus offering readers an opportunity to comprehend and compare names and naming practices across cultures. The chapters presented in this book explore the cultural significance of personal names, naming ceremonies, conventions and practices. They illustrate how these names and practices perform certain culture-specific functions, such as religion, identity and social activity. Some chapters address the socio-political significance of personal names and their expression of self and otherness. The book also links the linguistic structure of personal names to culture by looking at their morphology, syntax and semantics. It is divided into four sections: Section 1 demonstrates how personal names perform human culture, Section 2 focuses on how personal names index socio-political transitioning, Section 3 demonstrates religious values in personal names and naming, and Section 4 links linguistic structure and analysis of personal names to culture and heritage.
Interrogating Xenophobia and Nativism in Twenty-First-Century Africa interrogates xenophobia and nativism in Africa and how they hamper the realisation of Pan-Africanism. The contributors examine migration in Africa, immigration policies and politics, and the social impacts and history of xenophobia and nativism in African life and culture. Through their analyses, the contributors explore how xenophobia and nativism have impacted the Pan-Africanism movement. The book also offers suggestions for reducing xenophobia and nativism in Africa, including bettering immigration policies and creating socioeconomic structures that would enrich the public and help prevent the pervasive belief that immigrants usurp limited opportunities for the poor in the countries they immigrate to.
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.
Friendship is an important aspect of human society and a virtue that lies at the heart of sub-Saharan African societies. This study explores the art of friendship in the book of Job and how it resonates in the sub-Saharan African setting. As a wisdom tradition, the story offers a critique of friendship and of appropriate action with reference to particular circumstances, institutions, and persons, showing how the speeches, actions, and inactions of the characters inform friendship identities. Readers are exposed to proverbs, parables, and sayings from African communities, which show the richness of African culture and ethos. The similarities and differences between Western and African traditional worldviews and views of friendship come out clearly in the communal values of relatedness, loyalty, collaboration, empowerment, and goodwill.
A unique historical and linguistic resource for those in anthropology, art, folklore, history, linguistics, literature, psychology, religion, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as performers and poets. Not simply relics of the past, proverbs are an oral tradition containing historical and anthropological knowledge missing from conventional sources, and as micro-histories, provide a valuable source for the reconstruction of the manners, characteristics, and worldviews of societies. While only a few hundred Kamba proverbs have ever appeared in print, thousands have circulated over time, from the monsoon exchange era of the Roman Empire through the advent of Islam, European imperiali...