Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie—the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, The Truth about Marie's plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its ch...

For many students of philosophy in the West, philosophy is understood as a discipline stemming from Ancient Greece, embracing the great thinkers of medieval and early modern Europe and continuing through to the present day. To the extent that other philosophical traditions are taken into account, these tend to be selected philosophical traditions of Asia. Rarely is African philosophy considered in this context, even though Africa and the West are deeply interconnected through long historie...

We, the Decolonized is a passionate reflection on the pitfalls of the decolonial venture in postcolonial countries, with particular reference to North Africa. Hélé Béji shows that in many formerly colonized countries, the reality of independence took the form of elusive freedom, widespread disillusionment and the insidious survival of forms of domination bequeathed by former colonial powers.Béji delivers an trenchant critique of decolonization: the saddest of all liberties...

The concept of Afropessimism does not refer to Black people, but rather to the likelihood of white society overcoming its own negrophobia, and to a radical distrust in white narratives of inclusivity. What if the ideas and reforms we regard as progressive were just the new and shiny face of racism? In the time of Black Lives Matter, the unswerving dehumanization and killing of Black people form the bedrock of our civilization. But a vast anti-Black collective feeling also manifests itself ...

Raising feminist concerns about the struggles of African women amid debates surrounding the socio-cultural, economic and political future of Africa remains an immense challenge. Fatou Sow, the renowned Senegalese feminist activist and academic, illustrates here her own journey through a continuously developing global discourse. Her fundamental aim is to demonstrate the emergence and development of women's and feminist studies in Africa, highlighting its achievements, failures and, most imp...

Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves.Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of “colonial trauma” dat...

This book sets out to understand the ethical dimension of Black lives and deaths in the modern period. Recent events—from the brutal murder of George Floyd to the pervasive violence meted out daily on the streets of our cities—have demonstrated all too clearly the fundamental trait that shapes our contemporary moment: the Black condition is defined by indignity.Ajari takes dignity as his starting point because dignity is what white people try to abolish in their violence toward Bla...

In Counter-History of the Present Gabriel Rockhill contests, dismantles, and displaces one of the most widespread understandings of the contemporary world: that we are all living in a democratized and globalized era intimately connected by a single, overarching economic and technological network. Noting how such a narrative fails to account for the experiences of the billions of people who lack economic security, digital access, and real political power, Rockhill interrogates the ...

Frantz Fanon was a fearless critic of colonialism and a key figure in Algeria's struggle for independence. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives addresses Fanon's extraordinary, often contraversial writings, and examines the ways in which his work can shed light on contemporary issues in cultural politics. Embracing feminist theory, cultural studies and postcolonialism, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives offers new directions for cultural and political thought in the postc...

How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often privileging one expression or the other – the biological or the biographical. But is it possible to conceive of them together and thus reconcile naturalist and humanist approaches? Using research conducted on three continents and engaging in critical dialogue with Wittgenstein, Benjamin, an...

Introducing this collection of essays, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil r...

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of “world literature” and international human rights law are related phenomena.Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist ...