Africa in a Changing World: An Inventory (original) (raw)

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References (33)

  1. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere, vol. 2, edizione critica dell'Instituto Gramsci, a cura di Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975), 1376.
  2. Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword, conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), emphasis added, 66.
  3. Said, The Pen and the Sword, 68.
  4. Anne Hugon, The Exploration of Africa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 19.
  5. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L'aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). This work of historical fiction is an excellent illustration of the castrating effects of this pedagogy.
  6. On this point see also my discussion of "Europeanized" and "non-Europeanized" in "African Philosophy: The Point in Question," African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, edited by Tsenay Serequeberhan (New York: Paragon, 1991), 8-9. Through a critical self-reflection (Fanon and Cabral are our prime examples) a westernized, or Europeanized, African can critically question his/her subordinate relation to European culture and history. This is one of the central themes of my book, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994).
  7. Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 82-83.
  8. Ibid., 43.
  9. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 18. The use Lyotard makes of this term is akin to what I have referred to as the stance of false double negation in my book, Our Heritage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62.
  10. I borrow this formulation from Said, The Pen and the Sword, 67.
  11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 43.
  12. Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1964), 80, 81.
  13. Julius K. Nyerere, "Africa: The Current Situation," African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (June 1998), 8.
  14. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 118.
  15. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 376.
  16. On this, see my book, Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007).
  17. Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 10.
  18. On this, see "Africanity at the End of the 20th Century," African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1998).
  19. Gerald Caplan, The Betrayal of Africa (Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books, 2008), 34.
  20. Frantz Fanon, "Vérités premiéres à propos du probléme colonial" (originally published in El Moudjahid, no. 27, July 22, 1958), in Pour la revolution africaine (Paris: François Maspero, 1964), 141.
  21. Sembène Ousmane, Xala (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1976), emphasis added, 84.
  22. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 200-01. In full, Castoriadis states: "Factually speaking, the West has been and remains victorious-and not only through the force of its weapons: it remains so through its ideas, through its "models" of growth and development, through the statist and other structures which, having been created by it, are today adopted everywhere."
  23. I am thinking of this term in the way that Thomas S. Kuhn established it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
  24. Martin Plaut, "The UN's all-pervasive role in Africa," BBC News, 18 July 2007, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/af- rica/6903196.stm), 2.
  25. As Kwame Nkrumah noted long ago: "Although ap- parently strong because of their support from neocolonial- ists and imperialists, they are extremely vulnerable. Their survival depends on foreign support. Once this vital link is broken, they become powerless to maintain their posi- tions and privileges." Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 12. A case in point is Mengistu Hailemariam's Ethiopia that had to switch patrons, from the United States to the USSR, as a result of President Carter's "human rights" oriented foreign policy. When the Carter administration made it difficult for Mengistu to secure arms-in order to squash domestic opposition and, more urgently, to prosecute the colonial war in Eritrea-he became, overnight, a Marxist-Leninist and realigned Ethiopia with the USSR, in the then-raging Cold War. Soon thereafter, with the demise of the USSR, Mengistu's military dictatorship, lacking a foreign prop to protect it from the righteous wrath of the Eritrean Resistance, collapsed.
  26. Elizabeth Blunt, "Corruption 'costs Africa billions,'" BBC News, September 18, 2002, 02:32 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ africa/2265387.stm), 1.
  27. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 147.
  28. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 379.
  29. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 117; The Wretched of the Earth, 176, emphasis added. For a recent discussion of the enduring relevance of Fanon, for thinking the political situation of contemporary Africa, see Lewis R. Gordon's An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 220-48.
  30. Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 52.
  31. Here, I have in mind the precedent of Democratic Chile, the Chile of Salvador Allende. For a concise discussion of differing conceptions of democracy, see C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
  32. Karl Marx, from a letter to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 207.
  33. Herbert Marcuse, The Essential Marcuse, Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 10. As if to confirm the above observation, Henry Kissinger (then U.S. Secretary of State), in a 1970 memo to Richard Nixon on Allende's Chile, states: "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact-and even precedent value for-other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our position in it." As quoted by Naomi Klein in "Latin America's Shock Resistance," The Nation, November 2007, 28.