Radical Utu

Besi Brillian Muhonja is associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies and African, African American, and diaspora studies in the Department of English at James Madison University.

"In this loving, well-researched, and beautifully written book, Besi Brillian Muhonja brings out the other side of the distinguished environmentalist and Nobel laureate, Wangari Muta Maathai—that of thinker and activist scholar. By focusing on the philosophical and theoretical legacies of Maathai's work, the book takes us beyond the controversies and headlines to provide a powerful analysis of the philosophical thinking that drove her activism. Radical Utu is a model of how to prioritize African thinkers in the production of global knowledge." "This is a brilliant articulation of Nobel laureate Wangari Muta Maathai's philosophy of holistic environmentalism that is unapologetically rooted in radical utu, a philosophy of personhood that drives the rebalancing of power in societies. Muhonja applies the epistemological strategy of critical decolonial thinking to render visible the superb powerful thinker that is Wangari Maathai, who conceptually moved our comprehension of the self to a transgendered place where ecology revivifies humanity only if we, in turn, tend to its healing transformational powers."