{"id":3428,"date":"2026-03-20T13:41:02","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/darajapress.com\/?post_type=product&p=3428"},"modified":"2026-04-22T13:02:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T17:02:51","slug":"beyond-the-neocolonial","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/darajapress.com\/staging\/publication\/beyond-the-neocolonial\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Neocolonial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Table of contents<\/h3>\n
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Three Poems by Bertolt Brecht, Okot p\u2019Bitek, and Yannis Ritsos, Dedications and Acknowledgments, Prefatory Remark, In Lieu of a Foreword: some inspirational declarations and metaphors, Introduction: what is to be thought?, 1. Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence: thinking the common good, 2. The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkh\u0113 and the dialectic of physis and nomos, 3. Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics, 4. Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture, 5. Resolving Contradictions among the People and the Dialectical Emancipatory Potential of Proverbial Metaphors, 6. Haiti from Inventive Popular Sovereignty to Neocolonial State, 7. Beyond the Party Form? An alternative political experiment and the figure of the heroic liberator, 8. Democracy as Perverted Freedom: the anatomy of the African neocolonial state, Conclusion: silencing as analytical procedure in political theory and practice, References, Index, Author bio<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Humanity faces existential crises driven by the persistence of neocolonial capitalism and a state form that continues to de-humanise the majority. In Beyond the Neocolonial<\/i>, Michael Neocosmos argues that the failure <\/span>to enable, let alone to realise the popular desire for freedom in <\/span>post-independence Africa lies in the continuity of the colonial state and the dominance of analytical, statist thought over the transformative power of the dialectic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tracing the genealogy of emancipatory politics from the ancient wisdom of Egypt<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s Ma<\/i><\/span>\u2019<\/span><\/i>at<\/span><\/i> and Ionia<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s <\/span>isonomia<\/span><\/i> to the revolutionary theories of Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and Cabral, Neocosmos asserts that politics must be understood as a collective thought-practice of universal equality. He challenges the “stasis” of the current world order by recovering silenced histories of African popular inventiveness: from the egalitarian society constructed by the Bossales<\/i> in Haiti to the mass democratic experiments of the United Democratic Front in South Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Critiquing the exhausted “party form” and the myth of the “heroic liberator,” the book highlights the emancipatory potential within African popular culture, arguing that proverbs and the Palaver<\/i> contain latent prescriptions for resolving contradictions and healing community. This work is a call to abandon the “epistemology of ignorance” and revive a dialectics of becoming, locating the agency for a truly human future not in the state, but in the masses who make history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Listen to Michael Neocosmos talking about his book.<\/p>\n