Africa's quest for a philosophy of decolonization

Abstract

Editorial Forward Acknowledgments ONE Western Discourses on Africa 1. The Invention of the White Man 2. Western Attempts to Make Sense of Africa TWO Between Evolutionism and Pluralism: Tempes's Path to Human Sameness 1. Logic and Conversion 2. Mysticism and Rationality 3. Getting Over Evolutionism: Evangelization as Purification 4. Beyond Evolutionism and Relativism THREE The Holy Grail of Otherness 1. The Complementariness of Otherness: Negritude and the Idea of Race 2. Past-Oriented Temporality and Otherness: The Case of Mbiti FOUR Sameness versus Otherness 1. Myth and Reality in African Philosophy 2. Philosophic Sagacity 3. Fanon and the Rehabilitation through Violence FIVE Particularism versus Otherness 1. Diop and the Stolen Legacy 2. Traditionality in lieu of Otherness 3. From Otherness to Historicity: Hermeneutical School 4. The Primacy of Deconstruction SIX The Future as Forward Movement into the Past: The Constructedness of Identity 1. The Return to the Past 2. Questioning the Conflict between Tradition and Modernity 3. Postmodernist Approaches to African Identity 4. Myth-Making and Construction 5. African Attempts at Myth-Making SEVEN Colonization without Colonizers: The Phenomenon of African Elitism 1. From Colonialism to Elitism 2. The Elitist Drift of Ethnophilosophy 3. Power as Tutorship EIGHT Ethnicity and State Formation: The Mystical Root of Nationhood 1. Ethnicity and the African Philosophical Debate 2. Primordialism and the Naturalness of Ethnicity 3. Instrumentalism and the Constructedness of Ethnic Identities 4. Ethnicity and the Legitimacy of the State 5. From Ethnicity to Nation-State: The Mystical Moment NINE Harnessing Myth to Rationality 1. The African Dilemma 2. The Complementarity of Myth and Rationality 3. The Particularism of Freedom Notes Bibliography About the Author Index