The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an insurgent idea (to invoke this book s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a traveling theory (a la Edward Said s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem...

Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical...

Renowned Critical Africana scholar and philosopher, Molefi Kete Asante demonstrates the multidimensionality of Afrocentricity as a paradigm of theoretical perspectives advancing the agency of African people. Examining orientations to culture, society, values, and communication, Asante's essays face South first, and then to the rest of the world.

This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess what we describe as the 'conceptual aphasia' gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.

Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity examines the complex ways that gender and race shaped a liberation movement propelled by the Caribbean evolution of an African spiritual ethos. Jeanne Christensen proposes that Rastafari represents the most recent reworking of this spiritual ethos, referred to as African religiosity. The book contributes a new perspective to the literature on Rastafari, and through a historical lens, corrects the predominant static view of Rastafari women. In certain Rastafari manifestations, a growing livity...

Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties From Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali examines the Nation of Islam's quest for civil liberties as what might arguably be called the inaugural and first sustained challenge to the suppression of religious freedom in African American legal history. Borrowing insights from A. Leon Higgonbotham Jr.'s classic works on American slavery jurisprudence, Black Muslims and the Law reveals the Nation of Islam's strategic efforts to engage governmental officials from a position of power, and suggests the federal executive, congressmen, judges, lawyers, law...

In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925-1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma's book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party,...

This work argues that Africology represents an oasis of innovation in progressive venues. It brings together some of the most discussed theorists and intellectuals in the field of Africology and offers new interpretations and analysis while challenging the predominant frameworks in philosophy, social justice, literature, and history.

Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical...

This book explores how African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans from the former British colonies can be so different in their approaches toward social mobility.