Social Science

Remembering Africa

Name: Remembering Africa
Author: Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi
ISBN: 9780325070728

by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

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Synopsis

Product Description This collection of essays is concerned less with the representation of Africa than with the memory of the continent, focusing on how Africa is remembered through life experiences and various textual expressions functioning as sites of memory. Insightful essays introduce the legacies of cultural contact, and voices often blurred by traditional divisions between the West and Africa - and between colonizer and colonized - are clarified through dialogue. Review ?The place of Africa within cultural politics and the political imagination of the African diaspora has been and continues to be hotly debated. Mudimbe-Boyi has assembled a rich and diverse collection of approaches to these issues, with a particular concern to address the politics of memory. Africa is both a site of memory and a place remembered. Mudimbe-Boyi reminds us that there is no one Africa and that there is no single perspective that can capture the rich and ambiguous ways in which Africa is remembered. This volume will certainly stimulate much discussion on this important topic.?-Richard Roberts, Stanford University?With penetrating honesty, the authors explore the diverse politics and poetics - and the limits - of remembering and imagining a past definitively altered, by rereading classic and contemporary texts, reflecting on the politics of museum exhibits and university faculties, or celebrating dance and drumming. In doing so, they remind us of the depth of our loss and attraction for the past in the present, and of the powerful reciprocal influences of lived experiences and social construction, or agency and history, and of thinking and being. Exploring these tensions over a wide range of forms of expressing culture and personhood, these essays go far beyond Africa alone: they complicate, but also enrich, our complex humanity - at once a global humanity and an individual humanity.?-David Newbury, Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies, Department of History Smith College"With penetrating honesty, the authors explore the diverse politics and poetics--and the limits--of remembering and imagining a past definitively altered, by rereading classic and contemporary texts, reflecting on the politics of museum exhibits and university faculties, or celebrating dance and drumming. In doing so, they remind us of the depth of our loss and attraction for the past in the present, and of the powerful reciprocal influences of lived experiences and social construction, or agency and history, and of thinking and being. Exploring these tensions over a wide range of forms of expressing culture and personhood, these essays go far beyond Africa alone: they complicate, but also enrich, our complex humanity--at once a global humanity and an individual humanity."-David Newbury Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies Department of History Smith College"The place of Africa within cultural politics and the political imagination of the African diaspora has been and continues to be hotly debated. Mudimbe-Boyi has assembled a rich and diverse collection of approaches to these issues, with a particular concern to address the politics of memory. Africa is both a site of memory and a place remembered. Mudimbe-Boyi reminds us that there is no one Africa and that there is no single perspective that can capture the rich and ambiguous ways in which Africa is remembered. This volume will certainly stimulate much discussion on this important topic."-Richard Roberts Stanford University About the Author Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.