Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa: Some Critical Reflections (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Holistic Philosophy of Emancipation and the Post- colonial African State
This work philosophically responds to what one could call the domination by the social scientific scholarship, of the discourse of emancipation, in Africa. Using the research methods of critical analysis and reflective argumentation, the work makes two fundamental and justifiable claims. The first claim is that the concept of emancipation is significant in the human history of Africa, given its inglorious past experience of slavery, colonisation, and the existing neo-colonialism. Expectedly, given that emancipation is mainly reduced to a phenomenon of social scientific research, there is a rich and diverse scholarly discussion of emancipation as development from social sciences in Africa. However, the diverse richness of such scholarly discussion is still intellectually impoverished by the limited philosophical angle of the extant literature on emancipation in Africa and insufficient attention to some other central issues in the concept. Consequently, the second claim responds by calling for a well-worked-out, holistic philosophy of emancipation that exposes and addresses core issues in the contemporary plight of the African state, thereby attending to the problematic issue of reductionism and insufficiency of scholarly coverage in the traditional discussion of emancipation in Africa. Therefore, we attempt a discursive articulation of such a philosophy of holism as positive transformation, identifying the metaphysical, the moral, the logical, and the epistemic levels of analysis of emancipation in the post-colonial African state.
Political emancipation in the twenty-first century must be conceived and achieved through establishing a ‘distance’ from the state and its practices. This article argues that in order to begin to understand politics ‘at a distance from the state’, we need to first understand politics as a collective thought-practice. The thought of an emancipatory politics exists only when collective subjectivities exceed the limits imposed by social place, identities and interests defined and reproduced by state expressive subjectivities. In order to think a new emancipatory politics for the twenty-first century, we must therefore ‘absent the state in thought’, in other words, begin to understand an excessive subjectivity and how it interacts with state subjectivities which are always expressive of place. Therefore, ‘distance from the state’ here refers to subjective distance rather than to institutional, physical or social distance.
The Philosophical Ascent of Contemporary Political Theory & Development Edicts: Quo Vadis Africa? Seventh International Conference on African Development (7th ICAD) - Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development through Pluralistic Good Governance and Global Partnerships with African States, Jul 27-29, 2012, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, Abstract Africa heralded the birth of a new consciousness, a kind of non-identity that was based on determined bonding acts of human societal formations and not on geological precincts. More than millennia, the Axumites united into an Abyssinian kingdom, not by vouching their uniqueness but by exalting it and merging it in the new one. Today, of course, plaguing guerrilla-cum-military dictators, that openly deny and denounce the value of the rational dialogic, have isolated themselves, choosing to suppress citizens that have risen against deceit, betrayal and even treason. They shattered multi-ethnic human formations and replaced it with a series of war hawk ethnic regimes; spawning in the end, irredentist splinter groups. Philosophers from Marx and Adam Smith to contemporary pundits including Croce, McIlwain, Crowther, Azar Gat, Inglehart, Welzel, Avineri, and Birdsall have argued intelligently and scripted road maps for political change. This think piece in political theory is predicated on an analysis of pluralist societal transformation and developmentalism promoted by regimes and their Nobel Prize flaunting patriarchs, as against real politic in currency today that augurs on freedom from fear and want. It delves into the penury of ideological narratives of post-colonial regimes: developmentalism, which conformed to neither the delusionary neo-liberal camp nor the insipid venom of African Socialism. In combination with the vacuum in political theories and the resultant paradigmatic gridlock, the ills of governmentality were predicated upon the perpetuation of unbridled power. Hence, in political theory, openness of pluralistic liberalisation process can be understood as a dynamic two-way operation of generic forms on particular contents and particular contents on generic forms. Deployment of the conceptual and institutional machinery of pluralism is at the same time the representation of specific needs, interests, motivations, claims, rights and obligations by individuals and groups. Going beyond structuring or rearranging political actors and institutional activities in their spontaneous, often turbid reality, such operations should result in their transformation into transparent agency and practice within a plural political system. Key words: pluralism, developmentalism, neo-liberalism, generic vs. particular representations
Theory and Politics of African Decolonization
Prior to Ghana’s independence in 1957, Africa—the world’s second largest, and second most populous, continent—was nearly completely divided into colonial possessions owned by European imperial powers. By 1968, a short decade later, forty African countries had become independent nations through violent and non-violent struggle, leaving only fascist Portugal—and a handful of settler states—with substantial African possessions. At the forefront of this political moment was a group of African leaders and thinkers whose work helped shape not only the trajectory of individual African countries but the world as a whole. It is my contention that one cannot fully understand contemporary world politics without appreciating the processes of African decolonization. Unfortunately, most of the brilliant poets, intellectuals, and movement leaders at the heart of this world-historic transformation are not widely read today, especially in the American academy. This semester we will addresses this absence by reading their work as an entrée into thinking about present-day issues of economic inequality, political violence, and human emancipation in Africa, and around the world. The course starts with an examination of colonialism’s political, economic, cultural, and epistemic legacies. We then turn to specific debates concerning how various thinkers understood the problems facing the forging of African nation-states, the creation of a postcolonial African identity, and the establishment of an independent economy.
Africa Development, 2010
The paper begins from the axiomatic point that, despite the form it eventually took, namely that of a neo-colonial process, development was understood and fought for in Africa as [part of] an emancipatory political project central to the liberatory vision of the pan-African nationalism which emerged victorious at independence. Indeed independence was always seen, by radical nationalism in particular, as only the first step towards freedom and liberation from oppression, the second being economic development. Indeed 'economism' and 'statism' were mirror images of each other: it was believed that only the economy could liberate humanity and that only the state could drive the economy to progress. Today, the first proposition has been retained but the second has been dropped from hegemonic discourse. Yet the two are inseparable twins; it is in fact the case that just as the latter is false so is the former, for human emancipation is and can only be a political project. While development today is said to be guided by the (not so invisible) "hand of the market", the state has simultaneously 'subcontracted' many of its development management functions to external bodies such as NGOs. These are frequently simply new parastatals, vehicles for social entrepreneurship for a 'new' middle-class of development professionals. We have now a new form of state rule which forms the context for re-thinking development and politics. Central to this new form of rule is the hegemony of human rights discourse. This paper begins by reviewing the political assumptions of the nature of citizenship underlying T.H. Marshall's argument for 'social rights'; it provides a critique of human rights discourse and civil society from an emancipatory perspective, situating these within the new forms of imperialism and comments on the character of political parties and social movements in understanding political emancipation today. It argues that in Africa, if