Postcolonial Subjectivities In Africa

This is the third volume in a trilogy on identity, memory and subjectivity. Contributors to the book share an ambition to combine personal, political and existential dimensions in detailed evocations of the ambitions and vulnerabilities of contemporary Africans. Their essays aim to forge alliances between patient local scholarship and adventurous theoretical speculation that should inspire new research and caution against bland generalizations about African marginality.

In Subjectivity, Language and the Postcolonial, Hannah Botsis draws on theoretical work that exists at the intersection of critical social psychology, sociolinguistics and the political economy of language, to examine the relationships between language, subjectivity, materiality and political context. The book foregrounds the ways in which the work of Bourdieu could be read in conjunction with ‘poststructural’ theorists such as Butler and Derrida to offer a critical understanding of subjectivity, language and power in postcolonial contexts. This critical engagement with theorists traditionally from outside of psychology allows for a situated approach to understanding the embodied and symbolic possibilities and constraints for the postcolonial subject. This exploration opens up how micro-politics of power are refracted through ideological categories such as language, race and class in post-apartheid South Africa. Also drawing on the empirical findings of original research undertaken in the South African context on students’ linguistic biographies, the book offers a unique perspective – critical social theory is brought to bear on the empirical linguistic biographies of postcolonial subjects, offering insight into how power is negotiated in the postcolonial symbolic economy. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses including social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology, politics, and education, this is an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike.

Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa’s subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author’s sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays—his first book to be published in English—develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity — violence, wonder, and laughter — to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

African 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, critiquing universalist notions of democratization.

The contributors explore modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programmes in China and Zaire, and psychiatrists and their patients in Morocco and Ireland.

What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? This title tackles the question of race in West Africa through its post-colonial manifestations. Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of 'whiteness' to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African 'heritage tourism'.

DIVThe discursive construction of Africa under colonialism, with an emphasis on the part played by African writers themselves./div

Deep hiStories represents the first substantial publication on gender and colonialism in Southern Africa in recent years, and suggests methodological ways forward for a post-apartheid and postcolonial generation of scholars. The volume’s theorizing, which is based on Southern African regional material, is certain to impact on international debates on gender – debates which have shifted from earlier feminisms towards theorizations which include sexual difference, subjectivities, colonial (and postcolonial) discourses and the politics of representation. Deep hiStories goes beyond the dichotomies which have largely characterized the discussion of women and gender in Africa, and explores alternative models of interpretation such as ‘genealogies of voice’. These ‘genealogies’ transcend the conventional binaries of visibility and invisibility, speaking and silence. Works covering South Africa from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and Zimbabwe, Namibia and Cameroon in the twentieth include: • Colonial readings of Foucault • Ideologies of domesticity • Torture and testimony of slave women • Women as missionary targets • Gender and the public sphere • Race, science and spectacle • Male nursing on mines • Infanticide, insanity and social control • Fertility and the postcolonial state • Literary reconstructions of the past • Gender-blending and code-switching • De/colonizing the queer The collection includes diverse research on the body in Southern Africa for the first time. It brings new subtleties to the ongoing debates on culture, civility and sexuality, dealing centrally with constructions of race and whiteness in history and literature. It is an important resource for teachers and students of gender and colonial studies.