Description
Book SynopsisA broad range of cultural works produced in traditional and modern African communities shows a fundamental preoccupation with the concepts of communal solidarity and hospitality in societies driven by humanistic ideals. African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism is an inaugural attempt to focus exclusively and extensively on the question of humanism in African art and culture.
This collection brings together scholars from different disciplines who deftly examine the deployment of various forms of artistic production such as oral and written literatures, paintings, and cartoons to articulate an Afrocentric humanist discourse. The contributors argue that the artists, in their representation of civil wars, massive corruption, poverty, abuse of human rights, and other dehumanizing features of post-independence Africa, call for a return to the traditional African vision of humanism that is relentlessly being eroded by the realities of postcoloni
Trade Review
Despite the existence of entrenched humanistic values throughout African philosophical, moral, and religious beliefs and epistemologies, Humanism is too often conceived of, both historically and contemporarily, as a strictly European movement and cultural product. African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism is a much needed counter balance to that persistent inaccuracy, providing convincing examples from across national, disciplinary, and temporal boundaries. This collection of essays reveals that a universal concept of Humanism is not possible without input from Africa’s diverse voices and practices, especially when European Humanism played such an unfortunate, prominent role in the African colonial era. -- Stephen Bishop, University of New Mexico
This volume brings together scholars from different fields who incisively investigate the complex topoi of humanism in African cultural productions. Through the exploration of oral and written literatures, war speeches, paintings, and cartoons, contributors identify the ways in which various works engage the (re)emergence of African societies in the context of (neo)colonial, modern nationhood and globalization threats. This book is undoubtedly a major addition to readings in African socio-political history and culture. -- Alexie Tcheuyap, University of Toronto
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Crisis of Humanism in Contemporary Africa
Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou
Part I: Foundational Visions
Chapter One: Humanist Thought in African Oral Literature
Adrien Mbar Pouille
Chapter Two: Ritual and Humanism in Zakes Mda’s She Plays with the Darkness
Thomas Spreelin MacDonald
Chapter Three: “Through the Eyes of Dogs”: Reflections on Misanthropy and Humanism in a Senegalese Novel
Lifongo Vetinde
Part II: Power, Dystopia, and Postcolonial Violence
Chapter Four: “Remember the Children”: Humanism in Contemporary East African Fiction
Marie-Thérèse Toyi
Chapter Five: André Brink and the Politics of Humanism
Hervé Tchumkam
Chapter Six: Of Painting and Politics: Postcolonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Feymania in Cameroon
Jean-Blaise Samou
Part III: History, Trauma and the Pedagogy of Human Rights
Chapter Seven: Ojukwu’s War Speeches and the Rhetoric of Humanism
Uchenna David Uwakwe
Chapter Eight: Drawing (on) the Past in Histories of the Present: Dialogues and Drawings of Women's Organized Resistance to Forced Removals in South Africa's Past and Present
Koni Benson
Chapter Nine: Remembering the Past and Building the Future in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones
Mohamed Kamara
Chapter Ten: An Exploration of Human Rights in the Postcolonial Text: “The Conspiracy” by Henri Lopes
Janice Spleth
