Ngugi's sense of history and the post-colonial discourses in Kenya

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Chinua Achebe

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Humanities for the environment—A manifesto for research and action

Human preferences, practices and actions are the main drivers of global environmental change in the 21st century. It is crucial, therefore, to promote pro-environmental behavior. In order to accomplish this, we need to move beyond rational choice and behavioral decision theories, which do not capture the full range of commitments, assumptions, imaginaries, and belief systems that drive those preferences and actions. Humanities disciplines, such as philosophy, history, religious studies, gender studies, language and literary studies, psychology, and pedagogics do offer deep insights into human motivations, values, and choices. We believe that the expertise of such fields for transforming human preferences, practices and actions is ignored at society’s peril. We propose an agenda that focuses global humanities research on stepping up to the challenges of planetary environmental change. We have established Environmental Humanities Observatories through which to observe, explore and enact the crucial ways humanistic disciplines may help us understand and engage with global ecological problems by providing insight into human action, perceptions, and motivation. We present this Manifesto as an invitation for others to join the “Humanities for the Environment” open global consortium of humanities observatories as we continue to develop a shared research agenda

Whose Africa? Whose Culture? Reflections on agency, Travelling theory and cultural studies in Africa

Whose Africa? unconscioOne of the most prevalent theories about Africa in the wake of postmodernist scholarship is the idea of Africa as an invention of the West. One of the chief proponents of this thesis is Valentin Mudimbe, the Zairean philosopher and literary historian now teaching in the USA. In his widely acclaimed book, The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe (1988) argues that the idea of Africa is a product of the West and was conceived and conveyed through conflicting systems of knowledge. The idea of Africa is therefore tied to the colonial library or archives, which represents a body of knowledge constructed with the explicit purpose of faithfully translating and deciphering the African object. Mudimbe makes an even stronger case for the role of dominant systems of power and thought in the construction of a hybrid African and black diasporic identity. He asserts that Africa as a coherent ideological and political entity was, indeed, invented with the advent of European expansion and continuously reinvented by traditional African and diasporic intellectuals, not to mention metropolitan intellectuals and ideological apparatuses — educational institutions and their attendant disciplines, traveller accounts, popular media and so forth. In this accommodationist tendency, Mudimbe is supported by Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992) in their common belief that Africa’s embededness in the material and cultural terrain of the postcolonial and the postmodern is inescapable. As Kwaku Larbi Korang writes

A tribute and a celebration of Bhekizizwe Peterson

No abstract available.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsdy202023-03-19hj2022Centre for the Advancement of Scholarshi

Chapter 26 - #RhodesMustFall and the reform of the literature curriculum from Part IV - Canon Revisions

This chapter uses the #RhodesMust Fall movement as a point of entry into the debate on decolonization of English in South African universities. The chapter reads striking similarities in the workings of monuments like Rhodes’ statue in the context of the Empire and the English-language syllabus, which was an important purveyor of the English culture in the colonies and continues to shape postcolonial cultural experience. The chapter further argues that although the #Rhodes Must Fall movement provided a renewed impetus for the decolonisation of English in South Africa, it never was a watershed moment. Instead it argues that reform in the English departments has been gradual, and slow in coming, without anything startling. It makes the argument that to understand the real challenge to the English Literature syllabus one needs to have a long view of history and to absorb what has been taking place on the margins for years, way before the emergence of huge bursts of resistance that the “Fallist” movement represents. These include, among others, the work of translation of Western classics by some of Africa’s foundational writers; the role of African-language literatures, and indeed, the founding of the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 80s, which was dedicated to the teaching of African and Black diaspora literatures.https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decolonizing-the-english-literary-curriculum/4B2B28BDD55CBC4852A17509A227D047hj2024Centre for the Advancement of ScholarshipNon

Lookin back : James Ogude in conversation with Ben Okri : 26 April 2014, University of Pretoria, South Africa

No abstract available.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjls20hj2021Centre for the Advancement of Scholarshi

Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa

Chinua Achebe's novels and essays have always drawn our attention to issues of memory, the story, history and our own obligation to history as Africans. Achebe constantly goes back to the authority of narrative - the story; and as the subsequent generations of African writers like Chimamanda Adichie keep returning to, to celebrate Africa's many stories, its moments of failure and triumph. Achebe, more than any other writer on this continent, has inspired many, and hopefully the African story tellers of the coming centuries, irrespective of their location will continue to be inspired by him. This collection of essays is an enduring tribute to this rich legacy of Achebe