Bücher der Reihe Critical Africana Studies

In Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic, Mark Christian presents a Black British study within the context of the transatlantic and Liverpool, England. Taking a semi-autoethnographic approach based on the authors Black Liverpool heritage, Christian interacts with Paul Gilroys notion of the Black Atlantic. Yet, provides a fresh perspective that takes into account a famous British slave ports history that has been overlooked or under-utilized. The longevity of Black presence in the city involves a history of discrimination, stigma, and a population group known colloquially as Liverpool Born Blacks (LBBs). Crucially, this book provides the reader with a deeper insight of the transatlantic in regard to the movement of Black souls and their struggle for acceptance in a hostile environment. This book is an evocative, passionate, and revealing read.

Framing the concept of transcendence, this study covers over a dozen traditional African American works in an original and thought-provoking analysis that places canonical approaches in enlightened discourse with Africana studies reader-response priorities.

A Soviet Journey by the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925-1985) is one of the longest and most substantive accounts of the USSR by an African writer. It is a rare and important document of the antiapartheid struggle and the cold war period.

This book traces W.E.B. Du Bois's fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois's contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois's works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. ';The Coming of John', The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Bikos 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 imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from ';empirical absolutism' that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.

By examining Amilcar Cabral's theories and praxes, as well as several of the antecedents and major influences on the evolution of his radical politics and critical social theory, Concepts of Cabralism:Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory simultaneously reintroduces, chronicles, and analyzes several of the core characteristics of the Africana tradition of critical theory. Reiland Rabaka's primary preoccupation is with Cabral's theoretical and political legaciesthat is to say, with the ways in which he constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed theory and the aims, objectives, and concrete outcomes of his theoretical applications and discursive practices. The book begins with the Negritude Movement, and specifically the work of Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Next, it shifts the focus to Frantz Fanon's discourse on radical disalienation and revolutionary decolonization. Finally, it offers an extended engagement of Cabral's critical theory and contributions to the Africana tradition of critical theory. Ultimately, Concepts of Cabralism chronicles and critiques, revisits and revises the black radical tradition with an eye toward the ways in which classical black radicalism informs, or should inform, not only contemporary black radicalism, African nationalism, and Pan-Africanism, but also contemporary efforts to create a new anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist critical theory of contemporary societywhat has come to be called ';Africana critical theory.'

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' ( la Edward Said's concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois's discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.