Emeritus Professor in Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa; Distinguished Visiting Scholar University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, United States; Visiting Professor, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
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Política e cultura no pensamento emancipatório africano
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Política e cultura no pensamento emancipatório africano
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A atual ausência de uma visão emancipatória para a África está no centro dos nossos problemas políticos relacionados à opressão racial capitalista e colonial. Qualquer tentativa de repensar a emancipação política no continente africano deve ser capaz de localizar uma concepção universal de liberdade no interior das experiências culturais singulares que as pessoas vivem. Quando esteve baseada nas tradições populares, a política emancipatória exibiu tais traços dialéticos, independentemente da maneira específica na qual cada luta pela liberdade foi pensada em diferentes contextos históricos. No entanto, apenas alguns intelectuais militantes compreenderam a importância dessa dialética no pensamento.O presente volume esboça e discute dois pontos de vista particularmente importantes sobre o papel e a relevância da cultura popular na política emancipatória em África. Cada um deles resulta de formas distintas de exploração capitalista e colonialista: o primeiro viu a luz do dia em um contexto colonial, enquanto o segundo é diretamente confrontado pelo estado neocolonial. Todas as políticas emancipatórias são desenvolvidas em confronto com o poder estatal, e todas começam com um processo de discussão e debate através do qual um sujeito coletivo começa a se formar. No continente africano, a construção de tal sujeito político coletivo tem sido informada, de maneira fundamental, pelas culturas populares.
Os dois autores cujos ensaios estão aqui incluídos entenderam isso e colocaram a cultura popular no centro de suas políticas. O primeiro, Amílcar Cabral, aborda o papel central da cultura popular na luta pela independência da Guiné-Bissau nos anos 1970; o segundo, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, aborda a centralidade da cultura popular africana para uma política emancipatória endereçada à atual República Democrática do Congo. Apesar das décadas que os separam, tanto Cabral como Wamba-dia-Wamba desenvolvem, no centro de sua política, uma dialética que ativa os universais da cultura no presente. É essa característica que confere às suas visões uma importância central para o pensamento emancipatório contemporâneo.
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Politique et culture dans la pensée émancipatrice Africaine
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Politique et culture dans la pensée émancipatrice Africaine
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 9.00Au cœur de nos problèmes politiques issus d’un capitalisme racial et d’une oppression (néo)coloniale en Afrique aujourd’hui se trouve l’absence de toute vision émancipatrice véritable. Toute tentative de repenser une politique émancipatrice en Afrique doit pouvoir situer une vision universaliste de la liberté parmi les expériences culturelles singulières que les gens vivent. Les politiques émancipatrices quand elles existaient, bien que pensées dans les luttes pour la liberté ayant lieu dans des contextes historiques particuliers, mettaient toujours en vue une dialectique de ce genre quand elles étaient vraiment basées parmi les traditions populaires. Cependant, seulement une minorité de dirigeants intellectuels et militants comprenait l’importance d’une telle dialectique pour la pensée et l’action.
Ce petit livre trace le contour et discute de deux points de vue très importants sur le rôle de la culture populaire dans la politique émancipatrice en Afrique. Chacun d’entre eux émane de formes d’exploitation capitalistes coloniales distinctes : le premier a vu le jour dans un contexte colonial classique tandis que le second est directement issu d’un contexte étatique néocolonial. Toute politique émancipatrice est développée vis-à-vis le pouvoir d’état et toutes commencent avec un processus de discussion ou est formé un sujet collectif. Un tel sujet politique doit être fondamentalement informé par et conçu en relation avec les cultures populaires.
Les deux auteurs ci-inclus ont compris ce principe et mettent la culture populaire au centre de leur pensées politiques. Le premier, Amílcar Cabral se réfère au rôle principal de la culture dans la lutte contre le colonialisme au Guinée Bissau dans les années 1970 ; le second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba insiste sur le rôle central de la culture populaire pour une politique émancipatrice dans la République Démocratique du Congo aujourd’hui. Malgré la distance temporelle qui les sépare, tous les deux développent au centre de leurs politiques distinctes, une pensée dialectique qui déclenche des pensées universalistes depuis la culture populaire dans le présent. C’est pour cela que leurs points de vue sont d’une importance capitale pour la pensée de la politique émancipatrice en Afrique aujourd’hui.
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Domains of politics and modes of rule/ Sphères politiques et contrôle étatique (en/fr)
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Domains of politics and modes of rule/ Sphères politiques et contrôle étatique (en/fr)
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 10.00This work consists of a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people. It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population. In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination. Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens. In the domains of uncivil society and traditional society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so that different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people. In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle.
Il s’agit d’une brève tentative d’orienter l’étude de l’État néocolonial en Afrique à travers une évaluation de la manière dont il gouverne son peuple. On soutient que l’État produit différents modes de contrôle étatique en déployant différentes politiques sur différentes parties de la population. De cette manière, il peut combiner une règle véritablement démocratique à l’image de l’Occident sur certains tout en soumettant la majorité à des formes coloniales de domination. Les subjectivités politiques importées de l’Occident et son obsession du discours sur les droits de l’homme sont largement réservées à une sphère de la société civile dans laquelle le droit d’avoir des droits est conféré aux citoyens. Dans les domaines de la société incivile et de la société « traditionnelle », le droit aux droits n’est pas respecté par l’État, de sorte que différentes subjectivités, y compris régulièrement la violence, régissent la manière dont les problèmes politiques et leurs solutions sont abordés à la fois par l’État et par le peuple. En conséquence, des subjectivités politiques distinctes prévalent dans la conceptualisation de la résistance populaire dans chacun des trois domaines, et il devient difficile de rallier des préoccupations et des conceptions aussi différentes au sein d’une lutte anticoloniale nationSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
Domains of politics and modes of rule : Political structures of the neocolonial state in Africa
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Domains of politics and modes of rule : Political structures of the neocolonial state in Africa
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 10.00“A concise, dense and illuminating dissection of the workings of the post-independence African state that also charts a path towards imagining and working for a true politics of liberation.” — Ndongo Samba Sylla, Senior Researcher, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
This is a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people. It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population. In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination. Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens. In the domains of uncivil society and ‘traditional’ society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people. In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle.∴Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
Politics and Culture in African Emancipatory Thought
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Politics and Culture in African Emancipatory Thought
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 15.00The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought.
The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent.
The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amílcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today.Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Michael Neocosmos
To begin to think the emancipation of humanity on the African continent, we must start by distancing the thought and practice of politics from state thinking. State thinking has been and continues to be the core subjective aspect of the continuing failure of an emancipatory politics of equality on our continent. State thinking in the present day is no longer simply colonial but neocolonial. This means that state colonial practices have been modified but not to the extent that colonialism has been abolished. It still exists but under modified forms. The only way to think about political emancipation of the whole of humanity is to understand and practice dialectical thought. The dialectic of politics necessarily assumes a process of becoming of a popular political subject and its continued existence vis-à-vis the state. The latter can only think analytically and not dialectically because it is concerned with maintaining a system of socio-political places to which people are allocated according to criteria that ensure the reproduction of relations of domination, themselves underpinned by capitalist relations of exploitation.
This book traces the contradiction between dialectical thought and analytical thought, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians and Asiatic Greeks up to the present day among African people. It reviews the way in which emancipatory politics was thought in practice by classical Marxist thinkers and also the centrality of popular African culture in the thinking of African revolutionaries. It argues that a political dialectic was present to varying degrees in the thought of these thinkers and that they all attempted to confront state analytical thinking and practice with varying degrees of success at different times. The subjective problem they faced was that the dialectic founded on the idea of the universality of movement to which they adhered was in constant conflict with the stasis of analytical thought itself enabled by a belief in the party as representing the people that was ultimately to be realized in the capture of state power.
It is further shown that popular African thought, as expressed in metaphorical proverbs, regularly contains references to a human universal, thus deploying much more than rhetoric in a potential for dialectical thought. Popularly expressed reason frequently operates metaphorically and not within the delimited analytical categories deployed by academics and the state. This political process of the struggle between the dialectic and the analytic in thought-practice is also traced in Haiti whose culture is heavily influenced by Africa. The emancipatory egalitarian politics pursued there after independence in 1804, and their destruction by a neocolonial state predicted the same process in post-colonial African countries. At the same time Africa has witnessed the invention of alternatives to the party form of organization, particularly during the struggle for freedom in South Africa in the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that the anatomy of the neocolonial state on our continent must be understood primarily from the point of those it rules in order to unravel its neocolonial character. The creation and eulogizing of heroic figures during popular struggles for freedom is no substitute for the universal truth that only the oppressed can liberate both themselves and humanity from what is rapidly becoming the living hell of neocolonial capitalism.Table of Contents
Introduction: what is to be thought?
Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence
The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkhē and the dialectic of physis and nomos
Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics
Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture
Making Sense of Metaphors in African Popular Proverbs and Political Processes
Haiti: from popular political invention to neocolonialism
The Saturation of the Party Form: experimenting with alternative forms of organisation
Perverted Freedom and the Anatomy of the African Neocolonial State
Conclusion: silencing as an analytical process in political theory and practice