Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa

Product Description

In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

Review

'Among other accomplishments in this history of political thought in South Africa, Michael Eze succeeds in transcending two major approaches often taken to ubuntu, the sub-Saharan conception of morality prominent in South African socio-political discourse. One approach is that since ubuntu was an ideal way of life in pre-colonial times, it is worth reproducing today, while the other is that since ubuntu is merely a recent construction by political elites, it has no authority to guide policy. In contrast to both, Eze convincingly argues that ubuntu was part of traditional African culture prior to colonialism, but was far from ideal, and hence is something that today's South Africans should refashion collectively. Eze's 'creative historiographical' approach to ubuntu should guide all future thinking about the topic.'
-Thaddeus Metz, Humanities Research Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

About the Author

Michael Onyebuchi Eze""was a Stiftung Mercator Foundation Research Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institute (Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities) in Essen, Germany from 2006 - 2009. He received his first Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Witten-Herdecke, Germany, Summa Cum Laude. Dr. Eze currently teaches postcolonial African studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is also the editor of the online journal, "The African Communitarian: A Journal of African ethics, social and political thought." He has been published in many academic journals and is the author of "The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa," also from Palgrave.