This volume offers new and fascinating insights into some of the most urgent and relevant dimensions of violence in our time. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines explore some of the reasons and ways in which humans choose to harm one another. The two sections of the book engage a common theme, namely how ideological constructions influence, facilitate, and shape the understanding of our own involvement in violence. Whilst the first section focuses on one specific form of violence, namely genocide, the second explores our construction of violent images: verbally, visually, aurally,...

Twenty years after the end of apartheid rule, the claim that democratic South Africa is founded on the 'spirit of law' (nomos) of our shared humanity is questionable, to say the least. Some would argue that all talk of Ubuntu (or African humanism) should be dismissed as a passing fad of an exhausted nationalism. But, a different response to the present is possible; one that proceeds from a temporary suspension (epoche) of the nationalist matrix, and all the dead-end questions that have resulted from it, in order to reposition Ubuntu in the more cosmopolitan terms of a critical humanism that...

In South Africa, Ubuntu is the term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic, or ideology. This book contextualizes the discourse on Ubuntu within the wider historical framework of postcolonial attempts to rearticulate African humanism as a substantial philosophy and emancipatory ideology. As such, the emergence of Ubuntu as a postcolonial philosophy is posited as both a function of and a critical response to Western modernity. The central question addressed is: Was Ubuntu's emancipatory potential confined to and perhaps exhausted by South Africa's transition to democracy, or does the notion...

This collection is, in the best sense of the term, a homage to Valentin Mudimbe. The festschrift's essays honor the intellectual legacy of Mudimbe - for decades now, one of Africa and the diaspora's most significant minds - by taking up the challenges his work poses, be they ethical, political, philosophical, literary, sociological, anthropological, or psychological challenges. The book gathers a group of US- and Africa-based scholars, many of whom are long-time Mudimbe collaborators and colleagues, who use the questions posed, the critiques and insights offered, and the paradigms constructed...

Imitation happened when an unsuspecting philosopher one day found himself equally outraged by South African president Jacob Zuma's Big Man building project in Nkandla; awed, all over again, by Milan Kundera's Immortality; and numbed by the monument to hubris generally known as 'the highest basilica in all of Christendom', Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire. ENDORSEMENT QUOTES: 'Imitation is a strikingly original work of great subtlety, complexity, imagination, originality, and a clear homage to Milan Kundera's Immortality. I have never read a novel quite like this.' - JASON M....