Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa

by Eze, Michael Onyebuchi

• ISBN13: 9780230622999
• ISBN10: 0230622992
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book historicizes and contextualizes "Unbuntu," a type of discourse that has attempted to free itself from dogmatism and polemics. It offers a model for a redefinition of the overall intellectual history of Africa, through Unbuntu, that will integrate and contextualize the socio-political and cultural ideas of the continent.

Author Biography

Michael Onyebuchi Eze was a Stiftung Mercator Foundation Research Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institute (Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities) in Essen, Germany from 2006 – 2009. He received his first Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Witten-Herdecke, Germany, Summa Cum Laude. Dr. Eze currently teaches postcolonial African studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is also the editor of the online journal, The African Communitarian: A Journal of African ethics, social and political thought. He has been published in many academic journals and is the author of The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa, also from Palgrave.

Table of Contents

Introduction * South Africa: The Past is another country * South African (black) Nationalist ideologies and Resistance Movements * The “prophets” and the “Apocalypse” * When the chickens come to roost * Ubuntu: Many voices of a History * Ubuntu: A critique of Colonial/Apartheid reason? * Ubuntu and the making of South African Imaginary * Ubuntu: Towards a new public discourse * Conclusion: Towards a new humanism?