This volume is the first text to provide a comprehensive account of the great books across the academic disciplines written by Africans born in the continent and those who became naturalized citizens of African countries. These great books are those that have had a powerful, important or affecting influence on the author of a chapter in this book, as an individual, and on society. The books included here are mostly of the storytelling type and, thus, not representative of most of the academic disciplines. This volume allows each contributor to write a chapter on a discipline showcasing five great books written by African authors. Each selection is appraised and suggestions made by other experts in a discipline, while every chapter entails an introduction to the topic, a conceptual discussion of the discipline, a book-by-book review of the five books, and a conclusion and recommendations for research using the selected books.

This book calls for the institution of an African feminist philosophy of language, challenging existing debates and encouraging a move away from the Western gaze. The book begins with an analysis of the philosophical context of African feminism, and a call for the decolonization of epistemological discourse. Oyeleye then goes on to consider how indigenous patriarchies play out in the cultural reality of the Yorùbá in particular, ontologically unpacking the nature of woman as expressed in language, especially in myths and proverbs. Challenging the derogatory language found in proverbs which entrench patriarchal oppression, the author advocates for feminist postproverbials: new proverbs which draw on old traditions but reconstruct the space of woman in a new, egalitarian rhetorical tradition. The author concludes by outlining the conditions necessary for African feminist philosophers to consider language as a decolonizing space which can help to push through the agenda of social change. This book will be an important resource for researchers from across the fields of gender and women studies, feminist philosophy, philosophy of language, cultural studies, and African studies.

Corruption in Society: Multidisciplinary Conceptualizations is the first book to address the notion of corruption in a truly multidisciplinary manner, augmented with empirical evidence. The prevalent definition in books and articles on corruption is that it is a dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those with political and/or economic power, typically involving bribery. This political-economy or public choice denotation, while very useful, is inadequate for a comprehensive understanding of the concept because the notion of corruption appears in every discipline. For example, in the field of chemistry, chemical corruption concerns (a) the incorporation of defective compounds into experiments to better simulate conditions on the early-Earth and to help us understand how the first molecules of life formed and (b) how to make chemicals appear safer, sometimes dodging restrictions on their use, by minimizing the estimates of how much is released into the environment. In order to address this shortcoming, this book provides a discipline-by-discipline conceptualization of corruption buttressed with evidence from the discipline.

This volume sheds light on the wide range of perspectives on musical activity today, and shows how it can be analyzed from different points of view, working within a diverse theoretical framework. It is organized into three sections, the first of which discusses the changing contexts of musical work compositions over the 20th century. The second part offers a rich and in-depth musical analysis, rigorously connected to the performative and interpretative dimension, while the third considers the relationship between technology and music, and its influence on the creation of new paradigms for musical performance and creation. Covering practical and theoretical problems, the collection will be of great interest to scholars, professionals, students of music, composers, and performers.

Digital communication as it is practiced in Africa today is at a crossroad. This edited collection takes that crossroad as its starting point, as it both examines the complicated present and looks to the uncertain future of African communication systems. Contributing authors explore how western digital communication systems have proliferated in the African communication landscape, and argue that rich and long-cherished African forms of communal, in-person communication have been increasingly abandoned in favor of assimilation to western digital norms. As a result, future generations of Africans born on the continent and abroad may never recognize and appreciate African systems of communications. Acknowledging that globalized digital communication systems are here to stay, the volume contends that in order to comprehend the past, present, and future of African communications, scholars need to decolonize their approach to teaching and consuming mediated and in-person communications on the African continent and abroad.

This book is about the “Hundred-Word Eulogy,” a 100-character praise of Islam and Prophet Muhammad written by Zhu Yuanzhang, who reigned as the Hongwu Emperor of China from 1368 to 1398. The analysis of the eulogy is augmented with relevant Islamic texts. The book has become quite revered by many Muslim individuals and organizations across the globe. Yet, no work exists that has systematically analyzed the text. The purpose of this book, then, is to fill this vacuum. Methods from the fields of history, literary analysis, and pragmatic linguistics are employed to provide multidisciplinary and comprehensive analyses of the text, undergirded by the notion of meaning.

A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.