A strong, but underexplored linkage exists between the current global order, world poverty and th... more A strong, but underexplored linkage exists between the current global order, world poverty and the politics of aid. Exploring this linkage, which is the key concern of this article, is crucial for a fuller understanding of the symbiotic injustice of the global order and the politics of aid. Using a conceptual thought experiment that portrays the framework of post-war global order as an intrinsically unjust “Global Games Arena”, I attempt a “vivisection” of the problematic relationship between the global order and the politics of aid. In the real world, I follow decolonial scholars like Adom Getachew and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò to argue that the modern and current global order and its social, economic and political structures are founded on the unfair gains of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism. The empirical and analytical consequence of this situation, the article shows, is that to make aid effective or altogether end its penurious impact in Africa in particular, would require, at fir...
This study is a critical interrogation of the new era of politics in Europe and North America def... more This study is a critical interrogation of the new era of politics in Europe and North America defined by ultra-nationalism, heightened anti-Black racism and neo-fascism. Deploying the research methods of historical review, critical exposition and critical analysis, the study gathered data from library, archival and online sources in order to investigate the historical trajectories of anti-Black racism, ultra-nationalism and fascism in Europe and America, especially in the context of philosophical literature. The study revealed that major European philosophers of the Enlightenment era, including the German philosopher Immanuel Kant may have paradoxically played and still play a significant role in the rise of anti-Black racism, ultra-nationalism, fascism and its contemporary afterlives in Euro-American politics. The study concludes that the current state of Euro-American politics has deep roots in Euro-American cultural unconscious, and suggests that more work needs to be done to asc...
Conceiving global culture: Frantz Fanon and the politics of identity, Aug 30, 2018
The article introduces Frantz Fanon's notion of cultural humanism as a new way of conceiving glob... more The article introduces Frantz Fanon's notion of cultural humanism as a new way of conceiving global culture and, simultaneously, models a new framework for under standing the ethics and politics of identity today. Drawing critical insights from Fanon's 'Racism and Culture' and The Wretched of the Earth as well as the work of several other nonessentialist thinkers, the article develops an antiessentialist theory of (global) culture, asserting that culture and its values constitute a contested universal that all human beings are equal claimants to its appropriation, such that a particular putative culture is neither the basis of any individual or group identity, nor the grounds for treating anyone unjustly. In problematising global culture, the article foils Fanon's cultural humanism against a tradition of essentialist conceptions of culture in the thoughts of prominent EuroAmerican writers, from Immanuel Kant to Samuel P. Huntington. These other authors are usually thought of as developing theories of global culture, but evidently ended up with narrow/nationalistic, and racist and essentialist, notions of culture. At the same time, we choose Fanon and his theory of global culture as company throughout the article not only because his work and activism aimed to undo one of the most 82 Acta Academica / 2018:1 egregious consequences of false conceptions of (global) culture, colonialism, but because his work has continued to be relevant in many contemporary liberation/ humanistic discourses, even as he has sometimes been narrowly read as defending cultural nationalism.
A strong, but underexplored linkage exists between the current global order, world poverty and th... more A strong, but underexplored linkage exists between the current global order, world poverty and the politics of aid. Exploring this linkage, which is the key concern of this article, is crucial for a fuller understanding of the symbiotic injustice of the global order and the politics of aid. Using a conceptual thought experiment that portrays the framework of post-war global order as an intrinsically unjust “Global Games Arena”, I attempt a “vivisection” of the problematic relationship between the global order and the politics of aid. In the real world, I follow decolonial scholars like Adom Getachew and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò to argue that the modern and current global order and its social, economic and political structures are founded on the unfair gains of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism. The empirical and analytical consequence of this situation, the article shows, is that to make aid effective or altogether end its penurious impact in Africa in particular, would require, at fir...
This study is a critical interrogation of the new era of politics in Europe and North America def... more This study is a critical interrogation of the new era of politics in Europe and North America defined by ultra-nationalism, heightened anti-Black racism and neo-fascism. Deploying the research methods of historical review, critical exposition and critical analysis, the study gathered data from library, archival and online sources in order to investigate the historical trajectories of anti-Black racism, ultra-nationalism and fascism in Europe and America, especially in the context of philosophical literature. The study revealed that major European philosophers of the Enlightenment era, including the German philosopher Immanuel Kant may have paradoxically played and still play a significant role in the rise of anti-Black racism, ultra-nationalism, fascism and its contemporary afterlives in Euro-American politics. The study concludes that the current state of Euro-American politics has deep roots in Euro-American cultural unconscious, and suggests that more work needs to be done to asc...
Conceiving global culture: Frantz Fanon and the politics of identity, Aug 30, 2018
The article introduces Frantz Fanon's notion of cultural humanism as a new way of conceiving glob... more The article introduces Frantz Fanon's notion of cultural humanism as a new way of conceiving global culture and, simultaneously, models a new framework for under standing the ethics and politics of identity today. Drawing critical insights from Fanon's 'Racism and Culture' and The Wretched of the Earth as well as the work of several other nonessentialist thinkers, the article develops an antiessentialist theory of (global) culture, asserting that culture and its values constitute a contested universal that all human beings are equal claimants to its appropriation, such that a particular putative culture is neither the basis of any individual or group identity, nor the grounds for treating anyone unjustly. In problematising global culture, the article foils Fanon's cultural humanism against a tradition of essentialist conceptions of culture in the thoughts of prominent EuroAmerican writers, from Immanuel Kant to Samuel P. Huntington. These other authors are usually thought of as developing theories of global culture, but evidently ended up with narrow/nationalistic, and racist and essentialist, notions of culture. At the same time, we choose Fanon and his theory of global culture as company throughout the article not only because his work and activism aimed to undo one of the most 82 Acta Academica / 2018:1 egregious consequences of false conceptions of (global) culture, colonialism, but because his work has continued to be relevant in many contemporary liberation/ humanistic discourses, even as he has sometimes been narrowly read as defending cultural nationalism.
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