This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of ra... more This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of race and religion by focusing on one specific geographical region-Africa. The reality of political communities in Africa cannot be understood properly independently of colonial racialisation. The formation of colonial political CONTACT Josias Tembo
In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely c... more In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from "true" conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.
ABSTRACT The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African ... more ABSTRACT The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel’s call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.
In this article, I argue that a trans-Atlantic account of the constellations of race and religion... more In this article, I argue that a trans-Atlantic account of the constellations of race and religion demands that we understand racist thinking to be constituted by complex conceptual formations and relations. The failure to identify the conceptual complexity and interactive relations in racist thinking has led to universalist and exclusionary definitions of racist thinking and limited conceptions of the constellations of race and religion. Because the supposed universal definitions of racist thinking are formulated from particular regions of the trans-Atlantic, it has led to the masking and rejection of other formations of racist thinking from other regions of the trans-Atlantic. To avoid this, this article proposes a Trans-Atlantic Interactive and Relational Approach (TAIRA) that can help us to continue unmasking and understanding the trans-Atlantic connections between race and religion.
Social Dynamics A journal of African studies, 2022
This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of ra... more This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of race and religion by focusing on one specific geographical region-Africa. The reality of political communities in Africa cannot be understood properly independently of colonial racialisation. The formation of colonial political CONTACT Josias Tembo
The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars ... more The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel's call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.
Social Dynamics A journal of African studies, 2022
In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely c... more In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from "true" conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.
Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book... more Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity—which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essent...
Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference - Springer, 2019
The critique of Western metaphysics outlines how the African other has been depicted as not fully... more The critique of Western metaphysics outlines how the African other has been depicted as not fully human in relation to the western subject’s identity. Hence, on an ontological level, the other or difference has been denied or excluded, which accounts for the violence of the colonial logic of conceptualizing African alterity or difference. The challenge of thinking the postcolonial situation in the African context has mostly been how to think liberating difference and alterity outside the violent colonial paradigm constituted by the creation of race as Blackness, the Black man and the fiction of Africa. Hence the problem may be formulated accordingly in the following question: How may a sense of identity be thought that does not deny the existence of the other or difference as fully human? Restated: How may postcolonial African thought avoid constituting the same logic of race as it aims to overcome the colonial logic of alterity? Accordingly, this essay aims to critically engage with the thought of Achille Mbembe and his attempts to address the question. Even though Mbembe attends to the question of essentialism in African imaginations of otherness in On the Postcolony, he largely remains silent in this work on the ethical question of violent contemporary ways of conceptualizing otherness in African thoughts and sociopolitical practices. Therefore, while taking Mbembe’s social ontology that takes existence of difference and how difference constitutes identity (but largely remaining violent) as a point of departure, this essay will, subsequently, argue that in the Critique of Black Reason, one finds a step toward a postcolonial nonviolent notion of alterity based on the recognition of the in-common existence within one world we share, firstly, by outlining Mbembe’s formulation of a non-essentialist African identity that, in turn, opens the way for what we will call here a postcolonial ontology and, secondly, to outline how this ontology reimagines the relation of the universal and particular making it a postcolonial universal ontology.
Achille Mbembe's article " African Modes of Self-Writing " (2001), which is a precursor to his bo... more Achille Mbembe's article " African Modes of Self-Writing " (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault's notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity— which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe's view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe's " African Modes of Self-Writing " and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated Mbembe's appropriation of Foucault's notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe's conception of the socio-political and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to interrogate Mbembe's narrow appropriation of Foucault's conception of self-styling and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe's critique of African modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of Foucault's notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent problematic conception of African practices of freedom.
This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of ra... more This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of race and religion by focusing on one specific geographical region-Africa. The reality of political communities in Africa cannot be understood properly independently of colonial racialisation. The formation of colonial political CONTACT Josias Tembo
In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely c... more In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from "true" conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.
ABSTRACT The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African ... more ABSTRACT The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel’s call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.
In this article, I argue that a trans-Atlantic account of the constellations of race and religion... more In this article, I argue that a trans-Atlantic account of the constellations of race and religion demands that we understand racist thinking to be constituted by complex conceptual formations and relations. The failure to identify the conceptual complexity and interactive relations in racist thinking has led to universalist and exclusionary definitions of racist thinking and limited conceptions of the constellations of race and religion. Because the supposed universal definitions of racist thinking are formulated from particular regions of the trans-Atlantic, it has led to the masking and rejection of other formations of racist thinking from other regions of the trans-Atlantic. To avoid this, this article proposes a Trans-Atlantic Interactive and Relational Approach (TAIRA) that can help us to continue unmasking and understanding the trans-Atlantic connections between race and religion.
Social Dynamics A journal of African studies, 2022
This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of ra... more This special issue is meant to begin to address the lacuna in research on the entanglements of race and religion by focusing on one specific geographical region-Africa. The reality of political communities in Africa cannot be understood properly independently of colonial racialisation. The formation of colonial political CONTACT Josias Tembo
The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars ... more The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel's call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.
Social Dynamics A journal of African studies, 2022
In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely c... more In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from "true" conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.
Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book... more Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity—which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essent...
Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference - Springer, 2019
The critique of Western metaphysics outlines how the African other has been depicted as not fully... more The critique of Western metaphysics outlines how the African other has been depicted as not fully human in relation to the western subject’s identity. Hence, on an ontological level, the other or difference has been denied or excluded, which accounts for the violence of the colonial logic of conceptualizing African alterity or difference. The challenge of thinking the postcolonial situation in the African context has mostly been how to think liberating difference and alterity outside the violent colonial paradigm constituted by the creation of race as Blackness, the Black man and the fiction of Africa. Hence the problem may be formulated accordingly in the following question: How may a sense of identity be thought that does not deny the existence of the other or difference as fully human? Restated: How may postcolonial African thought avoid constituting the same logic of race as it aims to overcome the colonial logic of alterity? Accordingly, this essay aims to critically engage with the thought of Achille Mbembe and his attempts to address the question. Even though Mbembe attends to the question of essentialism in African imaginations of otherness in On the Postcolony, he largely remains silent in this work on the ethical question of violent contemporary ways of conceptualizing otherness in African thoughts and sociopolitical practices. Therefore, while taking Mbembe’s social ontology that takes existence of difference and how difference constitutes identity (but largely remaining violent) as a point of departure, this essay will, subsequently, argue that in the Critique of Black Reason, one finds a step toward a postcolonial nonviolent notion of alterity based on the recognition of the in-common existence within one world we share, firstly, by outlining Mbembe’s formulation of a non-essentialist African identity that, in turn, opens the way for what we will call here a postcolonial ontology and, secondly, to outline how this ontology reimagines the relation of the universal and particular making it a postcolonial universal ontology.
Achille Mbembe's article " African Modes of Self-Writing " (2001), which is a precursor to his bo... more Achille Mbembe's article " African Modes of Self-Writing " (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault's notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity— which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe's view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe's " African Modes of Self-Writing " and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated Mbembe's appropriation of Foucault's notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe's conception of the socio-political and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to interrogate Mbembe's narrow appropriation of Foucault's conception of self-styling and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe's critique of African modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of Foucault's notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent problematic conception of African practices of freedom.
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