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As dramatic changes unfold throughout the world, and the new millennium begins, many in South Africa have begun to ask 'what next'? The scale and pace of change have led to a feeling of powerlessness. How to cope with 'globalization', 'regionalization', a depleting ozone layer, new diseases, rampant militarization, let alone unseen structures of influence and oppression like race, class and gender? While there is no shortage of theoretical models on offer many feel that they are inadequate for the case of Southern Africa. In this book, scholars of both international relations and Southern Africa present a wide variety of thoughts on the future of the reign and the place of theory in helping us to understand the bewildering array of events characterizing the late-modern, early twenty-first century world. This book marks a 'call to theory': if Southern Africans are to overcome the divisive legacy of the past, and to move toward a more prosperous and sustainable collective future, theory must be placed at the centre of everyday life. For it is our understanding of the world that shapes both it and us.
This book describes how those individuals who are often most marginalised in postcolonial societies draw on age-old, non-western knowledge systems to adapt to the hardships characteristic of unequal societies in transformation. It highlights robust indigenous pathways and resilience responses used by elders and young people in urban and rural settings in challenging Southern African settings (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland) to explain an Indigenous Psychology theory. Flocking (rather than fighting, fleeing, freezing or fainting) is explained as a default collectivist, collaborative and pragmatic social innovation to provide communal care and support when resources are constrained, and needs are par for the course. Flocking is used to address, amongst others, climate change (drought and energy use in particular), lack of household income and securing livelihoods, food and nutrition, chronic disease (specifically HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis), barriers to access services (education, healthcare, social welfare support), as well as leisure and wellbeing. The book further deliberates whether the continued use of such an entrenched socio-cultural response mollifies citizens and decision-makers into accepting inequality, or whether it could also be used to spark citizen agency and disrupt longstanding structural disparities.
As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.
This book embraces South Africa and its place in the Global South, providing a succinct theoretical and empirical analysis and discussion of urban issues in the country. There have been sporadic calls from the Urban Geography community for the development of an overarching and comprehensive text that explores contemporary processes and practices taking place in urban South Africa and, more widely, the Global South. This is an edited collection of chapters by leading urban theorists and practitioners working on various themes within urban South Africa and serves as a base for scholars and students interested in urban perspectives from countries in the Global South.
Exploring how the region is changing today - as transnational solidarity and a single regional economy remove the distinctions between national and international politics - he asks whether South African domination can finally be overcome and considers what sort of cosmopolitan political arrangement will be appropriate for southern Africa in the new century."--BOOK JACKET.
This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual. With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.
For a long time, African Studies as a discipline has been spearheaded by academics and institutions in the Global North. This puts African Studies on the continent at a crossroads of making choices on whether such a discipline can be legitimately accepted as an epistemological discipline seeking objectivity and truth about Africa and the African peoples or a discipline meant to perpetuate the North’s hegemonic socio-economic, political and epistemic control over Africa. The compound question that immediately arises is: Who should produce what and which space should African Studies occupy in the academy both of the North and of the South? Confronted by such a question, one wonders whether the existence of African Studies Centres in the Global North academies open opportunities for critical thinking on Africa or it opens possibilities for the emergence of the same discipline in Africa as a fertile space for trans-disciplinary debate. While approaches critical for the development of African Studies are pervasive in African universities through fields such as cultural studies, social anthropology, history, sociology, indigenous knowledge studies and African philosophy, the discipline of African Studies though critical to Africa is rarely practiced as such in the African academy and its future on the continent remains bleak. African Studies in the Academy is a testimony that if honestly and objectively practiced, the crossroads position of African Studies as a discipline makes it a fertile ground for generating and testing new approaches critical for researching and understanding Africa. It also challenges Africa to seriously consider assuming its legitimate position to champion African Studies from within. These issues are at the heart of the present volume.
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.
The New Multilateralism in South African Diplomacy provides a detailed analysis of how post-apartheid South Africa has participated in multilateral diplomacy in a variety of sub-regional, regional and international settings during the last decade. The book will interest scholars interested in multilateralism and South African foreign policy.
Previous ed. (2005) has subtitle: State and society in transition.