155–156). By the mid-1960s, major anti-apartheid organizations in South Africa such as the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress had been virtually silenced by government repression. Yet, we all believe we know what "Africa" is, what In Consequences of Theory, edited by Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson. In short, Africa more than any other continent is the quintessential representational other of Europe; from the moment (historically understood) that the two continents became entangled with each other, the grammar of their self-definitions became distorted mirror images of the other. In My Father's House. 1. Some dismiss it as unimportant; others embrace it as an ideological weapon. There are many varieties of Pan-Africanism. But this is not an empty cartographic vessel either in so far as the diverse cultures and identities that have emerged and have yet to emerge have been and will continue to be shaped by the mapping and materiality of Africa as an ever changing spatial entity and social construct. The link was not copied. See also Afrocentricity ; Afropessimism ; Authenticity, Africa ; Ethnicity and Race ; Ethnocentrism ; Eurocentrism ; Europe, Idea of ; Maps and The Ideas They Express ; Multiculturalism, Africa ; Other, The, European Views of ; Pan-Africanism . There are two basic models of African socialism that represent its variations and development on the continent (Rosberg and Callag…, The African diaspora is a term that refers to the dispersal of African peoples to form a distinct, transnational community. New York: Dover, 1956. "Indigenous Mapmaking in Intertropical Africa." Such an archaeological project has not been undertaken, partly because it is a daunting task to untangle the interpellations and intersections of political and cultural identities for Africa's peoples—ethnic, national, continental, and global—and partly because African intellectuals, whether nationalist or postcolonial, have been preoccupied with denouncing or deconstructing Eurocentrism. ‘The idea of Africa’ considers the sheer scale of both the past and place of what we call ‘Africa’ and relates it to how the history of the region has been imagined and represented. Bernal, Martin. Encyclopedia.com. The Idea of Development in Africa challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by tracing the history of ideas, practices, and 'problems' of development used in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. The Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA) focuses on the investigation of the origin of humans in the African continent. This truncated characterization and racialization of Africa is of course not confined to Western scholars. Whilst not 'inventing ' the idea of Africa as we know it the classical view may have impacted later medieval perspectives. 15 Apr. Such an approach treats African philosophy as consisting in a set of shared beliefs, values, categories, and assumptions that are implicit in the language, practices, and beliefs of African cultures; in short, the uniquely African worldview. New York: Basic Books, 1996. "Exorcizing Hegel's Ghost: Africa's Challenge to Philosophy." The idea can be traced back to the 1887 work of Edward Blyden (1832–1912), the great nineteenth-century Liberian intellectual, for whom the modern "African personality," as he called it, was formed and would flourish out of the organic integration of the best elements from indigenous culture, Islam, and European science and Christianity. However, the date of retrieval is often important. ed. It is quite evident that there is no agreement on what "Africa" means, let alone how to define African identities beyond what can only be provisional and partial conceptualizations and categorizations. This article has chosen four typologies that seem best able to capture a wide range of constructions of Africa: the racial, representational, geographic, and historical conceptions. This notwithstanding, in this piece, the idea of Africa encompasses the territory about the city of Cartage and the sub-Saharan Africa. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. ." Clearly, there is little agreement on the sources and original meanings of the word Africa. Vols. Space, then, is not a static and passive template of social existence, but an active, constitutive force of the social's very composition and construction. Indiana University Press, 1994 - Africa - 234 pages 0 Reviews As its author Professor Mudimbe says: '...this book presents journeys into the multifaceted "idea" of Africa. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (African Systems of Thought) Appiah is unsparing in his attack on the dangerous fictions of race and racialist thinking and takes direct aim at some of the icons of Pan-Africanism, including W. E. B. Dubois (1868–1963). "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe / Roxana. Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in … The Mazrui-Soyinka debate over Mazrui's television series underscores the unresolved issues and stakes in contemporary definitions of Africa and Africanness. Gyekye, Kwame. It was in this sense that the term black was extended to "coloreds" (people of mixed race, Indians, and people of Asian descent) in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, and used to refer to people of African and Asian descent in Britain. In turn, European influences also became increasingly discernible in African mapmaking in terms of the materials used, the northerly orientation of some maps (e.g., Ras Makonnen's famous map of Ethiopia of 1899), and the methods employed in their construction (e.g., Cameroonian King Njoya's topographic survey from 1912 to 1916). In this sense, then, Africa was a European construct—as much as Europe itself was a construct inflicted by the idea of Africa (and Asia)—whose cartographic application was both gradual and contradictory in that as the name embraced the rest of the continent it increasingly came to be divorced from its original North African coding and became increasingly confined to the regions referred to in Eurocentric and sometimes Afrocentric conceptual mapping as "sub-Saharan Africa," seen as the pristine locus of the "real" Africa or what the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) called "Africa proper.". Far less clear is when the appropriation of Africa, as a self-defining identity, occurred in the various regions and among the innumerable societies that make up this vast continent, the second largest in the world. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. As histories of both religions clearly indicate, Christianity and Islam were implanted in certain parts of Africa almost at their inception and Africans made significant doctrinal contributions to both religions long before they were introduced to many parts of Europe and Asia where they are considered "indigenous," "traditional," or at least their "foreign" pedigree is not always emphasized. "The Scholar in African Society." The separation of North Africa is sometimes based on the question of consciousness and self-representation. The idea of a multinational unifying African state has been compared to various medieval African empires, including the Ethiopian Empire, the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Benin Empire, the Kanem Empire, and other historic nation states. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization with Particular Reference to the African Revolution. Black Power began as revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It is obvious that in such a subjective work I cannot claim to offer an exhaustive report analyzing all present tendencies or encompassing all within its frame. Dictionaries thesauruses pictures and press releases. For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us. The former traded with each other for centuries, shared religion (Islam) and a script (Arabic), and their languages are part of the Afro-Asiatic family. Hegel's "Africa proper" is, in his words, the "land of childhood," from which North Africa and especially Egypt is excised and attached to Europe, and where history, philosophy, and culture are "enveloped in the dark mantle of night" because its inhabitants, "the Negro exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state" (Hegel, pp. For example, the adoption of 1887. it must be, but when we think we have finally seen it, felt it, touched it, captured and tamed it with our terms of endearment, aversion, or indifference it suddenly melts away into a mirage beyond the assured and unilateral classifications of race, representation, geography, or history. Indeed, the African diaspora was African long before the communities they left behind on the continent developed a consciousness of being African. The divorce of North Africa may have started with the Arab invasions of the region in the seventh century, but got its epistemic and ideological imprimatur with the emergence of Eurocentricism following the rise of modern Europe, which for Africa entailed, initially and destructively, the Atlantic slave trade, out of which came the forced migration—the largest in human history—of millions of Africans and the formation of African diasporas in the Americas, diasporas that appropriated and popularized the name Africa and through whom Africa became increasingly racialized. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the Pan-African activist and intellectual and Ghana's first president, elaborated on Blyden's notion of the "African personality" in his concept of consciencism, a cultural and cognitive synthesis between the humanistic and socialist ethos of "traditional" Africa, the acquisitive capitalist values and redemptive Christian hopes of the "West," and the holistic secular and spiritual precepts of Islam. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). 1: Methodology and African Prehistory. Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Encyclopedia.com. The racist idea of white superiority and African backwardness was challenged, for example, by the publication in 1829 of David Walker's Appeal, which drew attention to Africa's glorious history, including that of ancient Egypt. Asante, Molefi Kete. The historical origins of the name Africa are in dispute. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Spivak, Gayatri. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph. At stake is the civilizing authority and antiquity of Africa. connected and constructed in intricate and contradictory and ever changing ways. Behind these conflicting definitions of Africa, about which regions to include and exclude, lie complex ideological and historical processes that need to be taken into account, for example, the relative decline from the sixteenth century of the trans-Saharan economy following the rise of the Atlantic economy. Translated by Russell Moore. Thus, in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, there is a hierarchy of spatial identities that are interwoven and interactive in complex ways engendering multiple cultural identities. He seeks to demolish essentialist conceptions of Africa and demonstrate that Africa is not a primordial fixture, but an invented reality, and Africans are not molded from the same clay of racial and cultural homogeneity. The three forces apparently exhibit enormous variations in their spatial and temporal manifestations, some are more dominant in certain regions, countries, and societies, and one could add here among certain classes and genders and at certain times, than in others. Also, the framing of "traditional" Africa versus "modern" Europe locks both Africa and Europe in a temporal binary that effectively dehistoricizes each. Fact of their training and institutional locations and methodological and theoretical orientations publications on Africa that omit... 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