African Postcolonial Modernity Informal Subjectivities and the Democratic Consensus

by Osha, Sanya

• ISBN13: 9781137446923
• ISBN10: 1137446927
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-09-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Today, African lives, cultures, and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world in terms of the contest between these institutions and a pristine 'nature.' The African continent jostles between these polarities in a turbulent and unpredictable manner as wars, genocide, famine, and other hardships punctuate its history and its struggles to develop. At the same time, this unpredictability is also a manifestation of hope, vigor and dynamism. This dynamic reveals often arresting insights into what humankind has been, what it is presently, and what it could be. In this sense, Africa manifests a sense of life that perpetually strives to escape modern institutions, even if it unavoidably must engage with those institutions.

Author Biography

Sanya Osha holds a PhD in Philosophy and has published extensively on anthropology, cultural studies, knowledge systems of Africa, the politics of the West African region, and the sociopolitical and cultural realities of Southern Africa. He joined the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI), Tshwane University of Technology as a research fellow in 2009.

Table of Contents

1. The Polis: From Greece to an African Athens

2. The Order/Other of Political Culture

3. Urbanscapes

4. Violence and the Production of Knowledge

5. Politics from the Global South

6. Global Activism and Discourses of Dispossession in South Africa

7. African Sexualities I

8. African Sexualities II

9. Yearnings of Modernity