Africa and the Disciplines

Africa and the Disciplines
Author: Robert H. Bates
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 1993-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226039013

African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separate continent in the world of American higher education. Its intellectual borders touch those of economics, literature, history, philosophy, and art; its history is the story of the world, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusion of Africa and the Disciplines, a book that addresses the question: Why should Africa be studied in the American university? This question was put to distinguished scholars in the social sciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are also leaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make a strong and enlightening case for the importance of research on Africa to the academy. Paul Collier's essay, for example, shows how studies of African economies have clarified our understanding of the small open economies, and contributed to the theory of repressed inflation and to a number of areas in microeconomics as well. Art historian Suzanne Blier uses the terms and concepts that her discipline has applied to Africa to analyze the habits of mind and social practice of her own field. Christopher L. Miller describes the confounding and enriching impact of Africa on European and American literary theory. Political scientist Richard Sklar outlines Africa's contributions to the study of political modernization, pluralism, and rational choice. These essays, together with others from scholars in history, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative literature, attest to the influence of African research throughout the curriculum. For many, knowledge from Africa seems distant and exotic. These powerful essays suggest the contrary: that such knowledge has shaped the way in which scholars in various disciplines understand their worlds. Eloquent testimony to Africa's necessary place in the mainstream of American education, this book should alter the academy's understanding of the significance of African research, its definition of core and periphery in human knowledge. "These essays are at once exceptionally thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive. Not only do they offer an unusually interesting overview of African studies; they are also striking for the depth and freshness of their insights. This is the sort of volume from which both seasoned regional experts and students stand to learn an enormous amount."—John Comaroff, University of Chicago "These essays provide an important perspective on the evolution of African studies and offer insights into what Africa can mean for the different humanistic and social science disciplines. Many show in ingenious and subtle ways the enormous potential that the study of Africa has for confounding the main tenets of established fields. One could only hope that the strictures expressed here would be taken to heart in the scholarly world."—Robert L. Tignor, Princeton University

Africanizing Knowledge

Africanizing Knowledge
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 643
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351324381

Nearly four decades ago, Terence Ranger questioned to what extent African history was actually African, and whether methods and concerns derived from Western historiography were really sufficient tools for researching and narrating African history. Despite a blossoming and branching out of Africanist scholarship in the last twenty years, that question is still haunting. The most prestigious locations for production of African studies are outside Africa itself, and scholars still seek a solution to this paradox. They agree that the ideal solution would be a flowering of institutions of higher learning within Africa which would draw not only Africanist scholars, but also financial resources to the continent. While the focus of this volume is on historical knowledge, the effort to make African scholarship "more African" is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The essays in this volume employ several innovative methods in an effort to study Africa on its own terms. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Africanizing African History," offers several diverse methods for bringing distinctly African modes of historical discourse to the foreground in academic historical research. Part 2, "African Creative Expression in Context," presents case studies of African art, literature, music, and poetry. It attempts to strip away the exotic or primitivist aura such topics often accumulate when presented in a foreign setting in order to illuminate the social, historical, and aesthetic contexts in which these works of art were originally produced. Part 3, "Writing about Colonialism," demonstrates that the study of imperialism in Africa remains a springboard for innovative work, which takes familiar ideas about Africa and considers them within new contexts. Part 4, "Scholars and Their Work," critically examines the process of African studies itself, including the roles of scholars in the production of knowledge about Africa. This timely and thoughtful volume will be of interest to African studies scholars and students who are concerned about the ways in which Africanist scholarship might become "more African."

African Indigenous Knowledge and the Disciplines

African Indigenous Knowledge and the Disciplines
Author: Gloria Emeagwali
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2014-11-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462097704

This text explores the multidisciplinary context of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems from scholars and scholar activists committed to the interrogation, production, articulation, dissemination and general development of endogenous and indigenous modes of intellectual activity and praxis. The work reinforces the demand for the decolonization of the academy and makes the case for a paradigmatic shift in content, subject matter and curriculum in institutions in Africa and elsewhere – with a view to challenging and rejecting disinformation and intellectual servitude. Indigenous intellectual discourses related to diverse disciplines take center stage in this volume with a focus on education, mathematics, medicine, chemistry and engineering in their historical and contemporary context.

The African Diaspora and the Disciplines

The African Diaspora and the Disciplines
Author: Tejumola Olaniyan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2010
Genre: African diaspora
ISBN: 0253354641

Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.

Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa

Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa
Author: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Publisher:
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9781611638332

This book is intended to contribute to discussions about the fundamental challenge of coloniality haunting humanities and social sciences in universities in Africa, while suggesting ways to de-link from and make a break with the epistemic injustices of embedded Eurocentrism that finds expression in the idea of and the content of academic disciplines as found in the current university system. It seeks to raise the possibility of a liberatory discourse on the intersection of power, epistemology, methodology and ideology in the hope that new epistemic lenses will be found and applied in order to achieve a better understanding of world realities, including realities on the periphery of the world system. It shows that the lenses embedded in the current coloniality of knowledge are in themselves technologies for suppression of horizontal discourses, subversive thought and new imagination. This book is the first to argue openly for epistemic disobedience against the imperialiality of social sciences and humanities conveyed through unthinking epistemology, methodologies, disciplines and research subjects. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin.

Diversity Across the Disciplines

Diversity Across the Disciplines
Author: Audrey J. Murrell
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1641139218

Diversity research and scholarship has evolved over the past several decades and is now reaching a critical juncture. While the scholarship on diversity and inclusion has advanced within various disciplines and subdisciplines, there have been limited conversations and collaborations across distinct areas of research. Theories, paradigms, research models and methodologies have evolved but continue to remain locked within specific area, disciplines, or theoretical canons. This collaborative edited volume examines diversity across disciplines in higher education. Our book brings together contributions from the arts, sciences, and professional fields. In order to advance diversity and inclusion across campuses, multiple disciplinary perspectives need to be acknowledged and considered broadly. The current higher education climate necessitates multicultural and interdisciplinary collaboration. Global partnerships and technological advances require faculty, administrators, and graduate students to reach beyond their disciplinary focus to achieve successful programs and research projects. We need to become more familiar discussing diversity across disciplines. Our book investigates diversity across disciplines with attention to people, process, policies, and paradigms. The four thematic categories of people, process, policies, and paradigms describe the multidisciplinary nature of diversity and topics relevant to faculty, administrators, and students in higher education. The framework provides a structure to understand the ways in which people are impacted by diversity and the complicated process of engaging with diversity in a variety of contexts. Policies draw attention to the dynamic nature of diversity across disciplines and paradigms presents models of diversity in research and education.

African linguistics across the disciplines

African linguistics across the disciplines
Author: Samuel Gyasi Obeng
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102120

Since the hiring of its first Africanist linguist Carleton Hodge in 1964, Indiana University’s Department of Linguistics has had a strong and continuing presence in the study of African languages and linguistics through the work of its faculty and of its graduates on the faculties of many other universities. Research on African linguistics at IU has covered some of the major language groups spoken on the African continent. Carleton Hodge’s work on Ancient Egyptian and Hausa, Paul Newman’s work on Hausa and Chadic languages, and Roxanna Ma Newman’s work on Hausa language structure and pedagogy have been some of the most important studies on Afro-Asiatic linguistics. With respect to Niger-Congo languages, the work of Charles Bird on Bambara and the Mande languages, Robert Botne’s work on Bantu structure (especially tense and aspect), Samuel Obeng and Colin Painter’s work on Ghanaian Languages (phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics), Robert Port’s studies on Swahili, and Erhard Voeltz's studies on Bantu linguistics are considered some of the most influential studies in the sub-field. On Nilo Saharan languages, the work of Tim Shopen on Songhay stands out. IU Linguistics has also forwarded theoretical work on African languages, such as John Goldsmith’s seminal research on tone in African languages. The African linguistics faculty at IU have either founded or edited important journals in African Studies, African languages, and African linguistics, including Africa Today, Studies in African Linguistics, and Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. In 1972, the Indiana University Department of Linguistics hosted the Third Annual Conference of African Linguistics. Proceedings of that conference were published by Indiana University Publications (African Series, vol. 7). In 1986, IU hosted the Seventeenth Annual Conference of African Linguistics with Paul Newman and Robert Botne editing the proceedings in a volume entitled Current Approaches to African Linguistics, vol. 5. In 2016, Indiana University hosted the 48th Annual Conference on African Linguistics with the theme African Linguistics Across the Disciplines. Proceedings of that meeting are published in this volume. The papers presented in this volume reflect the diversity of opportunities for language study in Africa. This collection of descriptive and theoretical work is the fruit of data gathering both in-country and abroad by researchers of languages spoken across the continent, from Sereer-sin in the west to Somali in the northeast to Ikalanga in the south. The range of topics in this volume is also broad, representative of the varied field work in country and abroad that inspires research in African linguistics. This collection of papers spans the disciplines of phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), morphology (both morphophonological and morphosyntactic), syntax, semantics, and language policy. The data and analyses presented in this volume offer a cross-disciplinary view of linguistic topics from the many under-resourced languages of Africa.

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262533901

Explorations of science, technology, and innovation in Africa not as the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge. In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable. The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production. Contributors Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer

African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences

African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences
Author: Gloria Emeagwali
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2016-07-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463005153

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African indigenous scientific and technological knowledge that can benefit a wide spectrum of academics, scholars, students, development agents, and policy makers, in both governmental and non-governmental organizations, and enable critical and alternative analyses and possibilities for understanding science and technology in an African historical and contemporary context.

Critical Terms for the Study of Africa

Critical Terms for the Study of Africa
Author: Gaurav Desai
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022654902X

For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.