Thinking Freedom in Africa conceives an emancipatory politics beginning from the axiom that ‘people think’. Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement of universal emancipation through a form of state politics. Marxism, which had encapsulated the idea of freedom for most of the twentieth century, was found wanting when it came to thinking emancipation because social interests and identities were understood as simply reflected in political subjectivity which could only lead to statist authoritarianism. Neo-liberalism and anti-colonial nationalism have also both assumed that freedom is realizable through the state, and have been equally authoritarian in their relations to those they have excluded on the African continent and elsewhere.Thinking Freedom in Africa then conceives emancipatory politics beginning from the axiom that ‘people think’. In other words, the idea that anyone is capable of engaging in a collective thought-practice which exceeds social place, interests and identities and which thus begins to think a politics of universal humanity. Using the work of thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon and many others, along with the inventive thought of people themselves in their experiences of struggle, the author proceeds to analyse how Africans themselves – with agency of their own – have thought emancipation during various historical political sequences and to show how emancipation may be thought today in a manner appropriate to twenty-first century conditions and concerns.

A pillar of African American literature, Richard Wright is one of the most celebrated and controversial authors in American history. His work championed intellectual freedom amid social and political chaos. Despite the popular and critical success of books such as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Black Boy (1945), and Native Son (1941), Wright faced staunch criticism and even censorship throughout his career for the graphic sexuality, intense violence, and communist themes in his work. Yet, many political theorists have ignored his radical ideas. In The Politics of Richard Wright, an interdisciplinary group of scholars embraces the controversies surrounding Wright as a public intellectual and author. Several contributors explore how the writer mixed fact and fiction to capture the empirical and emotional reality of living as a black person in a racist world. Others examine the role of gender in Wright's canonical and lesser-known writing and the implications of black male vulnerability. They also discuss the topics of black subjectivity, internationalism and diaspora, and the legacy of and responses to slavery in America. Wright's contributions to American political thought remain vital and relevant today. The Politics of Richard Wright is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics who strive to interpret this influential writer's life and legacy.

Salvaging a decolonised future Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Kevin Ochieng Okoth revisits historical moments when Black radicalism was defined by international solidarity in the struggle against capitalist-imperialism, that together help us to navigate the complex histories of the Black radical tradition. He challenges common misconceptions about national liberation, showing that the horizon of national liberation was not limited to the nation-building projects of post-independence governments. While African socialists sought to distance themselves from Marxism and argued for a ‘third way’ socialism rooted in ‘traditional African culture’ the intellectual and political tradition Okoth calls ‘Red Africa’ showed that Marxism and Black radicalism were never incompatible. The revolutionary Black politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which clings onto the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to let go. Red Africa is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, it is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition—which has been betrayed, violently suppressed, or erased—and to build from it a Black revolutionary politics capable of imagining new futures out of the uncertain present.

Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies the documents, testimonies, and petitions gathered by Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission as a portal to an unprecedented public archive of Ghanaian political history as told by the self-described survivors of human rights abuse.

An integrated collaborative work and a valuable source for understanding the underpinnings of the concept of spirituality that self-proclaims the "e;audacious"e; task of reformulating how we think about Spirit. It is about creative capacities, mind/brain, causality, free will, morality, consciousness, and beauty. In short, it is about being human.

Xenophobia is a political discourse. As such, its historical development as well as the conditions of its existence must be elucidated in terms of the practices and prescriptions that structure the field of politics. In South Africa, its history is connected to the manner citizenship has been conceived and fought over during the past fifty years at least. Migrant labour was de-nationalised by the apartheid state, while African nationalism saw it as the very foundation of that oppressive system. However, only those who could show a family connection with the colonial/apartheid formation of South Africa could claim citizenship at liberation. Others were excluded and seen as unjustified claimants to national resources. Xenophobia's current conditions of existence are to be found in the politics of a post-apartheid nationalism were state prescriptions founded on indigeneity have been allowed to dominate uncontested in condition of passive citizenship. The de-politicisation of a population, which had been able to assert its agency during the 1980s, through a discourse of 'human rights' in particular, has contributed to this passivity. State liberal politics have remained largely unchallenged. As in other cases of post-colonial transition in Africa, the hegemony of xenophobic discourse, the book shows, is to be sought in the character of the state consensus. Only a rethinking of citizenship as an active political identity can re-institute political agency and hence begin to provide alternative prescriptions to the political consensus of state-induced exclusion.

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed? The experts in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.