No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Communities and Identities: Gendered Reconstructionist Ideas for Africa
Abstract
The task of reconstructing African identity and community is made particularly difficult by, among other things, the fact that African countries are not homogeneous and the fluidity, relationality, and contextuality of the concept of identity. In light of this complexity, the challenge of such a reconstruction is engaging in an in-depth critical assessment of African cultural values, beliefs, goals, and aspirations, restoring what needs to be restored, jettisoning what is irrelevant, and adding what is truly beneficial from other communities. As a response to this challenge, this article argues that, to be complete and viable, the process of reconstruction must be gendered. It illustrates the process of gendered reconstruction by underscoring what that entails in the areas of women’s lived experience, the home, the workplace/marketplace, and scholarship.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving.
“Intricately transdisciplinary and cross-geographical, it is the first volume of its kind to caringly craft a gathering concept, that of ecocultural identities, bringing together the social, political, and ecological dimensions of identity. What results is a treasure of insights on the politics of life, broadly speaking, and a novel toolbox for tackling effectively the damages caused by modern capitalist modes of extraction and the urgent task of Earth’s ontological repair and renewal.”
Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Too often mislabelled an ‘issue,’ the environment is in fact integral not just to everything we do but to who we are. This link between our identity and our ecology has long been recognised in many societies, but others seem to have forgotten its signal importance. This superb collection shows why all identities are ecocultural ones, and why full recognition of this is essential to all our political futures.”
Noel Castree, University of Manchester
“A smart, provocative, and original collection, the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides a
definitive introduction to the constraints upon, and the contexts, formations, and impacts of, our diverse – but often unexamined – ecological selves.”
Robert Cox, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and three-time national president of the
Sierra Club
“I am in complete solidarity with this book.”
Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz
According to Kwame Nkrumah, the conscience of the African society is plagued with three strands of influences which have competing and conflicting ideologies: “African society has one segment which comprises our traditional way of life; it has a second segment which is filled by the presence of the Islamic tradition in Africa; it has a final segment which represents the infiltration of the Christian tradition and culture of Western Europe into Africa, using colonialism and neocolonialism as its primary vehicles.” When these three segments with their conflicting ideologies are allowed to co-exist, the African society “will be racked by the most malignant schizophrenia.” Nkrumah’s solution, philosophical consciencism, presents an ideology aimed at achieving a harmony among the three segments in such a way that is “in tune with the original humanist principles underlying African society.”I intend to do two main things in this paper: first, to present an analysis and critique of Nkrumah’s understanding of how the harmony is to be achieved in African societies; and second, to show how the theoretical ideas of philosophical consciencism – materialism, dialectical change, categorial conversion, socialism – are given actual form and content on the social-political scene.
The contrasting metaphors of discovery and creation are proposed here as alternative ways of understanding the nature of the task of identity formation. These two metaphors are related to the philosophies of eudaimonisn and existentialism, respectively. The processes of discovery and creation are shown to have distinctive theoretical implications regarding (a) the sources of identity elements, (b) the methods used in the evaluation of competing identity alternatives, and (c) the decision-making level on which a resolution of an identity crisis is most likely to be reached. Some practical implications of the two metaphors for counseling adolescents and others with identity concerns are also presented.
This article was my inaugural essay on the concept of Post-Africanism. In it I articulated the epistemological grounds for modern African thoughts to undertake a major shift from preoccupations with cultural/racial identity, colonialism, anti-colonialism, mental decolonization etc to a more positive engagement with modernity. Post-Africanism gestures toward a new state of African of African thoughts in which people no longer bother about how Europe under-developed Africa but how Africa can fully enter modernity.
African philosophy, comprising of ethno-philosophy, professional philosophy, nationalist-ideological philosophy, philosophic sagacity and their contemporary variants, is said to have begun as an account of contradiction and denial of Western-imposed identity. This chapter attempts to resolve the paradox of the overarching disconnect between the tenets of African philosophy and the practice of marginalization of women in contemporary Africa and within African philosophy. It also analyzes gender consciousness and inclusion vis-a-vis the pre-colonial Yoruba African world-view. The chapter employs the logical tool of hypothetical syllogism that if African philosophy is based on African world-views of complementarity, inclusion, being-with-others; then external (colonial) influence on the thought and socialization process is responsible for contemporary marginalization of women. The chapter also discusses the validity, truth and soundness of each premise of the hypothetical syllogism argument through the hermeneutic analysis of the pre-colonial Yoruba African world-view.
Cultural identity refers to the psychological connection between an individual's self and a culture. In this paper, we identify three components that make up an individual's cultural identity – cultural knowledge, category label, and social connections. The cultural knowledge component connects an individual with a culture through the individual's direct endorsement of what are widely known to be the culture's central characteristics. The category label component connects an individual with a culture through the individual's depersonalized membership in a cultural collective. The social connections component connects an individual with a culture through networks of specific social relationships. The three components are conceptually distinct, and yet may have interconnections in influencing the development of cultural identity. We examine the implications of the three components on cultural identification processes in the context of multiculturalism and global cultural contact.
The "woman question," this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories--the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of "woman," central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed. "Oyewùmi's book is a departure from the majority of feminist writers on Africa. She goes further to show a society almost unintelligible using the common set of presumptions in feminist literature about how society is organized. Her indignation is real and forceful and her research and lucid presentation admirable." Modern African Studies "Oyewumi's work is an extremely interesting study that forces readers to rethink some of the accepted notions of colonialism." National Women's Studies Association Journal Oyeronke Oyewumi is assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Elements of Physics in Yoruba Culture, Part 2
- Supo Ogunbunmi
- Henry M Olaitan
Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: 4 Essays by Kwasi Wiredu. Selected and introduced by Olusegun Oladipo
- Kwasi Wiredu
Resistance and Decolonization. Translated by Dan Wood, with an introduction by Reiland Rabaka
- Amílcar Cabral
Some Contemporary Beliefs and Ideas
- J V L Casserley
Tradition versus Modernity: Reappraising a False Dichotomy
- Helen Lauer
Sexism and Gender Discourse in World History
- Sophie Oluwole
- Bosede