What is Africanness? : Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities / Charles Ngwena.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ngwena, C. G., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Group identity.

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (306 p.)

Other Title:

ConcrÃtisation du Droit au DÃveloppement en Afrique – Le Cas du Cameroun

Concrétisation du Droit au Développement en Afrique – Le Cas du Cameroun

Place of Publication:

Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) 2018

Pretoria : Pretoria University Law Press (PULP), 2018.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What is Africanness: Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, by Charles Ngwena, Professor of Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, is a peer-reviewed monograph aiming to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation in and beyond South Africa about who is African and what is African. It aims to implicate a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’) by showing its teleology and effects; and offers an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. The book develops an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africanness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. It interrogates the making of Africa in colonial discourses and the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within. The arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity by addressing an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. The book develops an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings.

Contents:

Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogenous Africanness

1. Introducing the 'manyness' of Africanness

2. Hermeneutics of Africanness: building on Stuart Hall's cultural theory of identifications

Part 2: Africanness, race and culture

3. What's in a name? : the naming of Africa and Africans, and the construction of radical cultural alterity

4. Africa as land of racial otherness

5. Decentring the race of Africanness

Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities

6. Representing African sexualitites: contesting nativism from without

7. 'Transgressive' sexualitites: contesting nativism from within and overcoming status subordination

8. Mediating conflicting sexuality identifications through politics and an ethics of pluralism

Epilogue : theorising Africanness.

Notes:

Description based on: online resource; title from PDF information screen (Worldcat, viewed March 27, 2023).