Africa After Modernism: Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy

by Janis; Michael

• ISBN13: 9780415957236
• ISBN10: 0415957230
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-08-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought?on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates?this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness andpan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Africana Modernist Contexts: Exoticism, Pan Africanism, Postcolonialism	p. 1
Leiris in Africa: The Psychoanalysis of Exoticism	p. 43
Signatures of Africa in Carpentier's America	p. 67
African Avant-Garde: Ouologuem's Anticolonialist Anthropology	p. 87
Postmodern Primitivism: Images of Africa in the Western Media	p. 105
Africana Philosophy: Identity and Alienation	p. 135
Afterword: The "Second Sight" of Masks	p. 177
Notes	p. 181
Bibliography	p. 227
Index	p. 255
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