Bücher der Reihe Critical Africana Studies

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.

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.

African Sovereigns shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. The author demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool.

This book critically examines Ama Mazama, a prominent and leading female theorist in Africology and African American Studies, and her intellectual work. The author studies how and why Ama Mazama has evolved into one of the most popular Africologists in the field.

Molefi Kete Asante confronts the socialist Pan African idea with an Afrocentric orientation grounded in history and culture, suggesting that the African renaissance cannot take place unless there is a commitment to creating an African community conscious of its own myths, origins, and economic, cultural, and philosophical traditions.

This book engages deeply with the epistemologies and methodologies that have emerged from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante's work on Afrocentricity.

Dialogues across Diasporas makes an important contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the intimate historical, political, and literary connections between two of the largest diasporic groups in the Americas and beyond - members of the African/a and Latina/o diasporas. This collection not only serves as a useful required text for Diaspora Studies courses, it offers a model for taking discussions of diasporic identities, community politics, and cultural memory beyond the classroom and into the community.

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.

Facing South to Africa is a bold synthesis of the ideas that have made Afrocentric theorists the leading voices of the African renaissance. Written from the vantage point of the philosophical and political discourse that emerged over the past twenty-five years, this is a highly readable and accessible introduction to African social and cultural criticism. Molefi Kete Asante engages in the practice of critical thinking by raising fundamental questions about how Africans view themselves and the world. Tackling the themes of culture, education, social sciences, the university, politics, African unity, and the prospects for peace in Africa, Facing South to Africa is a fresh, daring, and popularizing synthesis of the best critical thought on the issues of modern knowledge. Asante's plan is to reorient our thinking on Africa by asking questions of Africa and Africans rather than imposing preconceived, external ideas on African issues.

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.

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.'

Dialogues across Diasporas makes an important contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the intimate historical, political, and literary connections between two of the largest diasporic groups in the Americas and beyond - members of the African/a and Latina/o diasporas. This collection not only serves as a useful required text for Diaspora Studies courses, it offers a model for taking discussions of diasporic identities, community politics, and cultural memory beyond the classroom and into the community.

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 enforcement officials, prison administrators, state governments, and African American civic leaders held a common understanding of what it meant to be and not to be African American and religious in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War. The work raises basic questions about the rights of African descended people to define god, question white moral authority, and critique the moral legitimacy of American war efforts according to their own beliefs and standards.