Ato Sekyi-Otu
Ato Sekyi-Otu is a Ghanaian political philosopher. He was born at Saltpond, Ghana in 1941 and until 1971 was known as Daniel Sackey Walker. He went to Harvard and received an A.B. in Government in 1966. He pursued graduate studies…
This is the work of an unusually awesome intellect and flawless scholarship. As Ato himself may agree, if our scholars and writers have to do their work using the English language, then we of the neo-colonies are doing that language a whole lot of good. If the book was about nothing else than Professor Sekyi-Otu’s merciless dissection of the wretched story of the life and career of Kwasi Kwarteng, an arch-conservative member of the British Conservative Party, that alone makes the book a compelling read.
— The late, Ama Ata Aidoo,
author, poet, playwright and academic, author of
Changes: A Love Story and Dilemma of a Ghost
More precious, untimely observations from the most important black political philosopher writing in English. Read, learn, savor, be provoked, read again, repeat.
— Paul Gilroy,
author The Black Atlantic
The echoes of Fanon pervade this incisive analysis that spares no one, refuses any postulation of idyllic longings, and interrogates our responsibilities in every aspect of the histories that live within us. This work offers a powerful and incisive reflection on human freedom and responsibility in an affirmation of dignity that can only fully emerge upon recognition of the cruelty of the inhumanities that pervades our histories and their geographies. It is an existential call to lay bare so that we might understand the biting complexity of indignity and reach through its morass to discover the depths of our humanity no matter how deeply that humanity is assaulted. Homestead, Homeland, Home charts this journey with biting clarity and takes irony as a “vital organ of truth and justice” to the apogee of its power.
—Jacqueline M Martinez, Professor of Communication, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts
Arizona State University,
Vice-President, Caribbean Philosophical Association
I lost count of the number of times I laughed out loud reading this book and the number of times I had to put it down in chest-tightening anguish. Ato Sekyi-Otu long ago demonstrated that he was a first-rate scholar. With these meditations, though, these ‘peeves’ as he hilariously describes them, he reveals himself a member of an even more remarkable group – those who dare attempt to rouse a world lost in shadow gazing. Homestead, Homeland, Home dissects global society and reveals a malignant inhumanity. It is a challenge and resource for those who can be shaken and a damning indictment on those who will not. It is bracing, severe, funny, heartbreaking, brilliant and very, very cool.’
—Bryan Mukandi, Senior Research Fellow,
School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia
This is a book of peeves well worth peeving about. It is testimony from a great elder of political thought whose heartfelt commitments to dignity, freedom, justice, and humane existence irritate his soul as a witness to the continued cruelty, degradation, and double standards unleashed against the Damned of the Earth; it is erudite outrage at so many ignored opportunities to make good on political responsibility to build a better world, a world otherwise. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every chapter is a Sankofic demand against historic amnesia and an encomium to re-member and, in doing so, courageously embrace our shared responsibility to build institutions for the urgent repair of nothing short of humanity’s homestead in which we are, in Sekyi-Otu’s words, “compelled to recognize that only we can save ourselves.”
—Lewis R. Gordon, author of
Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization and
Fear of Black Consciousness
Homestead Homeland Home: Critical Reflections is political-philosophic tour de force by Ghana’s leading public intellectual Ato Sekyi-Otu. Each chapter brims with insight, irony (humorous and often indecent, like the George W. Bush highway in Accra), and analytical precision as he subjects the homesteads, Canada and the USA and the homeland, Ghana, to his partisan universalist critique. Ee weaves his reflections with the thoughts of philosophers, thinkers, and sages of the human condition and the poets, songwriters, and dreamers of human liberation.
— Nigel Gibson, author of
Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination
Raging against the solitary confinement of despair into compartmentalized finitudes and possessive particularisms, Ato Sekyi-Otu continues in these epigrammatic reflections to put his unmistakable mixture of resentment and fury at the service of a new principle of hope. In search of a place to call home, untethered to any exclusionary metaphysics of difference, he makes short shrift of the willful amnesia surrounding the criminal junction of capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and anti-black racism, with their interlocking systems of subjugation; refuses the preaching of collective guilt and abject misanthropy alike; and instills in the reader a concrete utopian belief in freedom from the dominion of race, egalitarian self-determination, and partisan universalism as common sense. These fragments of a vision of humanity unbound will leave no one untouched by their relentless tarrying with the world’s prose and intermittent poetry.
—Bruno Bosteels, author of The Actuality of Communism
For those familiar with Sekyi-Otu’s work, Homestead, Homeland, Home is another instalment of what are gift offerings of his extraordinary mind and intellect. And for those not familiar, they better start reading these reflections right now, and don’t stop until you are fully done with them. Here is something to arouse the consciousness with beauty, poise, and quiet brilliance.
— Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University
Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. It is no exaggeration to affirm that he is one of the most innovative contemporary dialectical thinkers This book bears eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and also to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice. Deeply anchored in African cultures and modes of life, Sekyi-Otu has shown how ideas of human universality are ingrained in African popular sayings and proverbs and are regularly reflected in artistic creations. He writes:
“I said I discovered my blackness at Harvard and the USA. That’s because at Mfantsipim School I was not a Black student but simply a student a-racial. Back in Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, in a kind of return of the a-racial and re-acquaintance with the ordinary, I would not be a Black professor but a professor. Of course, there is no such thing as a ‘professor’ unmodified. There are, and there will always be, other prefixes, be they of defining or ancillary significance. But it would not be a Black professor. That’s because there I am not primarily a racialized subject, not Black. … In Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, unless I applied some serious bleaching agents, the fact of my black skin will remain unchanged. But the specific gravity of the lived experience of blackness will be registered otherwise. True, from the lovely landscape of that university, the metaphysics, politics, economics and culture of white supremacy as a world system will not disappear. Neither will the struggle against the persistence of its forms and the necessity of weapons of criticism aimed at these forms end.”
THE ARGUMENT
1
FORGETTING TO RE-MEMBER
Obama At The Door Of No Return
Tu Quoque Ogua’s Oblivion
II
SONGS OF SANKOFA
The Joseph Project The Year of Return
The Beautiful City
So Are You Going Back to Live There?
III
ONE REASON FOR THE JOURNEY BACK
The Lore of Race
Of Crime and Punishment Sue Bird’s Reprieve
My Brother’s Keeper
Zimmerman Syndrome
Jivani’s Answer and Sartre’s Wager
Variations on Racist Inference
On the Very Talk of Black on Black Crime
Of Crime Without MetaphysicsIV
THE BLACK PROFESSOR’S BURDEN
The Other Dream Deferred
The Pedagogic Bond as Racial Covenant
The Text. Reading as Racial Allegory
Dissertation as Race War
Chimera of Pure Forms?
Or Utopian Realism
Contrapuntal Vibrations
V
HUMAN THINGS, BLACK KINDS?
Serenading Serena
Black Love?
And Black Food?
VI
PROPERTY RITES
Forbidden Appropriation
A Luta Continua
Reductio. Who Owns the Kente
Other Felonies
Ethical Appropriation. Hard Cases
What (Critique of) Identity Politics Is Not
Ethics as Identity Politics?
Black Skin, Differing Worlds? The Gravity of Small Differences
VII
OBSERVATIONS ON USA (NOT IN THE KEY OF THE PANEGYRIC)
Pre-Curses
Hyperbole Nation
Bipartisanship USA
The Big Beam in Your Eye “The American People”
The Liberty of Savages?
Postscript
Masks of Freedom
Infantile Individualism, Juvenile Patriotism
Restrictions: Motive and Consequence
American Justice, Canadian Prism
Henry Kissinger and the Insufferable Exaltation of the Wicked
Milton’s Satan or Nietzsche’s Kant
New Orleans, Old USA
From Katrina to the Pandemic
Malcolm’ Truth
The American Evasion of Inference
“That’s Not Who We Are”: Metaphysics Of/And the Nation
How Not To Insult The Other Americas
Travesties of Proust
How American Exceptionalism Is Made
Alternative Definitions of American Exceptionalism
The Sorry Figure of the American Liberal
Interpretation of Migrants’ Dreams
American Theodicy
Lament for the Nation
Wrong Diagnosis
Mistaken Etiology
USA Before and After Trump
Bolivia’s Revenge The World Après Trump
Right Names Matter
Afghanistan: Auspicious Domino?
What A Wonderful World
VIII
HOMELAND IS NOT YET HOME
Bessie’s Question, Ernst’ Dream
“Take But Degree Away”: Homeland Variations
Of Abdul and Master
Language, Life and Death
Criminal Prudery
Abdication of the Guardians
“No Saviours”
Mind of the Right
The NPP’s Creed and Its Vanguard
Brothers Under the Skin
Property-Owning Democracy
The Metaprocedural Republic
Pray to God or Pray the Court
Sins of the National Cathedral
Raison d’état According to the Party of Reason
Naana: A Political and Personal Celebration
Postscript: The Pitfalls of Praising the Living
Trickledown Predation
Enlightenment’s Avatars
“Prehistory in a Tailcoat”
Two Concepts of Hope
“Perpetual Solicitude” and Absolute Faith
The Sacral and the Carceral
Concerning Faith: A Soliloquy
Our Holy Factors
First Principle
Fraudulent Faith and Fatal Folly
Black Lives Matter. What of Ghanaian Human Lives?
Little Kindnesses, “Antagonistic Totality”
Mea Culpa
The Rage and the Grief
Exile’s Reputed Rewards
Homeland’s Burdened Blessings
The Trouble With “Diaspora”
Antiphonies of Homecoming
IX
STRANGE THINGS OF THE WORLD
The Souls of Rightwing Black Folks
Rightwing Blacks’ Notion of Power
John Ridley’s Black Pantheon
Exceptional Blacks and the American Ideology
Lament of an Exceptional Black
Rghtwing Jews: An Autobiography of Sorrow
Ayaan Hirshi Ali
V.S. Naipaul; A Belated Notice
Fareed Zakaria
Dinesh D’Souza
Colours of Anti-Black Racism
Anti-Black Racism’s Kaleidoscope
X
KWARTENG’S TALE
Prologue
Logic of a World
A Meteor’s Constellation
The Fall
Epilogue
XI
PEEVES AND DREAMS AT LARGE
After 9/11: Sophistic Analytics, Treacherous Taxonomies
Eccentric Affinities, Amorphous Antipathies
On First Seeing George Walker Bush Highway in Accra: A Report on Nausea
#Must Fall: Ethics With Borders (Of Time)
Postscript: Family Resemblances in Metaethics
Collective Guilt, Selective Application
Of the Passions of the Devout
Treason of the Putative Left
Other Ethnocultural Cleansers
Solidarity, regardless Verboten: Rerum Cognoscere Causas Cause, Case, Connectedness
Other Rightwing Acts of Grand Larceny Definition of the New Right
Conservatives and History
“Bringing Democracy to Indian Reserves”
Internecine Violence of the Vanquished Some Iconic Names and Sayings of Our Time in Translation
Reform Redefined, Freedom Reframed Towards Truth in Political Economy
Rival Versions of Ethics and Economics
Some Linguistic Gems of Our Time (Nor Intended to be Witticisms)
China Risen. Next?
China Under Surveillance
Two Concepts of Power
What of Putin’s Russia
Testing the Categorical Imperative
The Lure of Misanthropy
Beautiful Bonds
Traitorous Ties
Treacherous Oaths
The Grateful Dead
XII
PERSISTENT POLEMICS, COUNTERVAILING MUSINGS
Two Unpublished Letters to the Editor
Postscript: Still Framing Fanon
Perverse Consistency: The Case of Hannah Arendt Transcultural Curiosities
The Poverty of Monoculturalism
Wrongful Conviction
“Singing Truth”
EPILOGUE
While I Am Still Old Enough To Dream
Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
---|
There are no reviews yet.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.