Is Ali Mazrui a visonary or a "vacuous" intellectual? Is he recationary, revolutionary or essentially a radical pragmatist? These questions were the focus of a special plenary session of the Conference of the African Assocation of Political Science that took place in Harrare, Zimbabwe, in June 2003. The forum was intended to interrogate Ali Mazrui's contributions in the last forty years or so of his career as an academic. The question themselves capture the magnitude of polarization among different sections of Mazrui's audiences generated by his often provocative propositions amd prescriptions on a wide range of issues---from the role of intellectuals in Africa's transformation to the imperative of pax-Africana, from Tanza-philia to Islamophobia, from the condition of the Black woman to the destiny of the Black race. It is some the exchanges, sometimes intense and even acrimonious, arising from Mazrui's ideas on continetal and global African affairs, from the 1960s ti the present, that constitute the subject matter. Together, they are not only a celebration of Ail Mazrui's own intellectual life as one long debate, but also an intellectual mirror of the conours of some of the hotly contested terrains in Africa's quest for self-realization.

This volume examines race, gender, and identity in African American culture. As with previous volumes in the series, these collected essays provide a social science and interdisciplinary framework for the exploration of Africana cultural and social phenomena. The contributors have adopted mixed methods and meta-theory tools of analysis to describe and evaluate these issues from an African-centered perspective. Kameelah Martin examines the role of women in the films of Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons. Toya Roberts offers an experimental study of African American males at predominantly white institutions of higher education. Rochelle Brocks digs into the transition, transformation, and transcendence of civil rights to the Black Arts/Black Power movements for social change. Portia K. Maultsby provides an ethnographic study, inspecting the genre of funk music in the United States. James L. Conyers, Jr. analyzes the doctoral dissertation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which cataloged the impact of colonialism on Africana culture. Kesha Morant Williams and Ronald L. Jackson II examine the impact of lupus on the identity of African American women. Ronald Turner’s essay examines black workers challenging racist practices by their union representatives. Lisbeth Gant-Britton renders a conceptual history of the hip-hop community, with emphasis on international issues. This volume is an invaluable sourcebook for those studying African American affairs, history, and cultural studies.

What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities by Charles Ngwena 2018 ISBN: 978-1-920538-82-8 Pages: 306 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available About the publication 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. Comments Charles Ngwena’s timely and original book is a wonderful read, rich in theory and insight, and an essential companion for those interested in exploring the ‘multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities’ that constitute the diversity of ‘Africanness’ and African identities. – Professor Cathi Albertyn, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Editor, South African Journal on Human Rights This is a brilliant exploration of liberating and affirming ways to speak of African identities and sexualities, reminding us there can be creative beauty where pain and dispossession have resided. – Rudo Chigudu, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria This is a masterpiece! Not only does the author capture the discourse and debates on “Africanness”, he aptly examines them before offering his views on “decentring the race of Africanness” with the important recognition of “Africa as land of diverse identifications”. – Prof Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE DEDICATION PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS 1. INTRODUCING THE ‘MANYNESS’ OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction 2 Nativism 2.1 Theocratic vision 2.2 Logic of identity 3 Reformulating African identity: Overcoming status subordination and achieving inclusive equality 4 Scope and structure of the book: A broad triangulation of race, culture and sexualities 4.1 Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogeneous Africanness 4.2 Part 2: Africanness, race and culture 4.3 Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities 2. HERMENEUTICS OF AFRICANNESS: BUILDING ON STUART HALL’S CULTURAL THEORY OF IDENTIFICATIONS 1 Introduction 2 Connecting inclusive equality with a deconstructive hermeneutics of Africanness 3 Who/what is African?: A central discursive question 4 Hall’s cultural theory of identity as enunciation 4.1 Identity as becoming and being 4.2 Implications of a Hallian approach for conceptualising Africanness 4.2.1 Transposing Hall’s theory to Africanness as broad cultural and racial identifications 4.2.2 Transposing Hall’s theory onto African sexuality identifications 5 Positionality 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 1 Introduction: Representation, truth, knowledge and power 2 Naming of Africa 2.1 Provenance of the naming 3 Naming of Africans: Epochal re-description 3.1 Africa at the edge of time: The founding of alterity in anachronistic space 3.2 Africa as land of cultural otherness: A leaf from Mudimbe’s The invention of Africa 3.2.1 Christianity and the production of African spiritual alterity 3.2.2 Anthropology and the production of African cultural alterity 4 Mudimbe’s contribution to dialogic Africanness 4. AFRICA AS LAND OF RACIAL OTHERNESS 1 Introduction 2 The contribution of philosophy and science to the construction of African racial alterity 2.1 Philosophy 2.2 Science 3 Re-membering Saartjie Baartman: Black embodiment, ascribed identity and fetishisation 3.1 Logic of identity 3.2 Fetishisation 4 Apartheid and the banality of race 4.1 Creating ‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Whites’ 4.1.1 ‘Africans’ and ‘Whites’ as extreme polarities 4.1.2 ‘Coloureds’ 4.1.3 ‘Indians’ 4.2 Racial positioning among inferiorised ‘races’ 4.3 Apartheid as not so much about apartness but baasskapism 5 Ode to an open Africanness 5. DECENTRING THE RACE OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction: putting race under erasure 2 Recalling Hall’s deconstructive identification template 3 Decentring the race of Africanness 3.1 Appiah’s In my father’s house 3.2 Blyden’s black personality 4 Retaining the political salience of race 4.1 Afropolitanism 5 Africa as space for diverse identifications and recognition of ever-evolving ethnicities PART 3: HETEROGENEOUS SEXUALITIES 6. REPRESENTING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHOUT 1 Introduction 2 Said’s discourse of orientalism 2.1 Orientalism and Said’s aporias 2.1.1 Hybridity: Breaking with coloniser/ colonised binary 3 Nativising African peoples 4 Mamdani’s discourse of nativism 5 Nativism and the construction of colonial whiteness 5.1 Compulsory whiteness and regulation of sexualities 6 Nativising black men’s sexuality 6.1 Southern Rhodesia and the phantom of the ‘black peril’ 7 Black women’s sexual degeneracy and colonial continuities in Caldwell et al: A performative study of African women 7. ‘TRANSGRESSIVE’ SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHIN AND OVERCOMING STATUS SUBORDINATION 1 Introduction 1.1 Proclaiming heterosexuality and castigating homosexuality 1.2 Democratising sexuality 2 Discursive clarifications 2.1 Transgressive sexualities: the terminological rationale 2.2 Overcoming status subordination 2.3 Avoiding LGBTI essentialism 2.4 Avoiding unproductive LGBTI anti-essentialism 2.5 Remaining conscious of colonising sexuality knowledge 3 Deconstructing sexualities 3.1 Essentialist social construction 3.2 Transformative social construction 3.3 Deconstructing the relationship between sexuality and gender: Drawing on Richardson’s analytic template 3.3.1 Naturalist approach 3.3.2 Prioritising gender over sexuality 3.3.3 Gender as an effect of sexuality 3.3.4 Sex and gender as separate, non-deterministic, historically and culturally situated systems 3.3.5 Sexuality and gender elision 4 Way forward 8. MEDIATING CONFLICTING SEXUALITY IDENTIFICATIONS THROUGH POLITICS AND AN ETHICS OF PLURALISM 1 Introduction 2 Rawls’ overlapping consensus 3 Rescher’s dissensus management approach 4 Young’s critique of the ideal of impartiality and the civic public 5 Arendt’s concept of citizenship in a plural political community 6 Finding an overlapping consensus and asymmetrical reciprocity in African political and constitutional frameworks EPILOGUE: THEORISING AFRICANNESS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

In today's Africa racism and ethnicity have been implicated in serious conflicts - from Egypt to Mali to South Africa - that have cost lives and undermined efforts to achieve national cohesion and meaningful development. Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa sets about rethinking the role of media and communication in perpetuating, reinforcing and reining in racism, absolute ethnicity and other discriminations across Africa. It goes beyond the customary discussion of media racism and ethnic stereotyping to critically address broader issues of identity, belonging and exclusion. Topics covered include racism in South African newspapers, pluralist media debates in Kenya, media discourses on same-sex relations in Uganda and ethnicised news coverage in Nigerian newspapers.

Ali Mazrui has been described as one of the most original thinkers that Africa has produced, and one of the top 100 living public intellectuals in the world today. This volume uses Mazrui's life and work as a guide towards explaining the historical impact of black public intellectuals such as Julius K. Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba and Barrack Obama. The book explores not only politics and academics, but also religion, gender, class and civil-military relations, bringing together into the black experience both Plato's concept of the "e;philosopher King"e; and V.I. Lenin's notion of the 'intelligentsia'