Chielozona Eze - Böcker

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003148272, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003148272, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa’s response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society?The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigm in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders’ responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures.Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approaches to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.

The first extended examination into the structure of influence of Zora Neale Hurston’s work on major Black women writers, an idea that has been widely accepted, this book explores Hurston’s impact on such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Rita Dove, and Tracy K. Smith.Focusing specifically on the concept of desire as a liberatory idiom and as the highest expression of self-consciousness and personhood, Chielozona Eze delves into the ethical and social assumptions of Hurston’s aesthetics and feminist visions and their manifestations in the works of the Black women writers who came after her.Through philosophical conceptions of desire, and zoning in on Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God and its protagonist Janie Crawford, Eze unlocks crucial conceptual and analytic trajectories regarding debates on freedom, personhood and Black feminism, and how such rich interiority appears in key works by Black women. Surveying fiction including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and The Color Purple, and poetry collections such as Life on Mars, The Body’s Question The Yellow House on the Corner, Thomas and Beulah, this book is a remarkable intervention with important implications for our times.

Genocide has become a part of the contemporary global expression of political violence. After all, every continent has had its genocide, but genocide in Africa and the African diaspora is distinctly different from those in Europe or the West. This text approaches genocide from within the context of Africa and the African diaspora to examine political and philosophical after-effects of global colonialism.As genocidal state violence has become prominent through colonialism, its appearance in Europe and the West have developed sharply against how it appears in colonized spaces within the African diaspora. This text argues that such a difference in orientation is needed to develop new concepts, critical approaches, and perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and anti-black politics as a way of critically understanding global genocide and the presence of continual genocidal violence.

Genocide has become a part of the contemporary global expression of political violence. After all, every continent has had its genocide, but genocide in Africa and the African diaspora is distinctly different from those in Europe or the West. This text approaches genocide from within the context of Africa and the African diaspora to examine political and philosophical after-effects of global colonialism.As genocidal state violence has become prominent through colonialism, its appearance in Europe and the West have developed sharply against how it appears in colonized spaces within the African diaspora. This text argues that such a difference in orientation is needed to develop new concepts, critical approaches, and perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and anti-black politics as a way of critically understanding global genocide and the presence of continual genocidal violence.

Examines the importance of South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy, especially in light of Nelson Mandela's belief that cosmopolitan dreams are not only desirable but a binding duty.Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu left an enduring legacy of forgiveness, openness, and solidarity in South Africa. This book looks at how the country's historic transition to democracy has not only changed the negative narrative about South Africa but also provided a model for a new form of ethical participation in the world. In addition to Mandela and Tutu, this book considers South African cultural theorists, poets, and novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele, and Antjie Krog, all of whom have engaged with the struggle to overcome the legacies of apartheid and create a more humane society. Most of these figures share common cultural and moral traits with Mandela and Tutu, the most outstanding of which is their belief in the notion of global citizenship. In engaging the latter concept, this work seeks to answer the following questions: How can we understand being human in a world that is increasingly marked by hatred of others? Can Mandela's vision of his society provide us with a theory of how to live in our globalized world? This wide-ranging volume will appeal to scholars and students of history, African studies, literature, ethics, and international affairs.CHIELOZONA EZE is Professor of African literature and cultural studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Extraordinary Professor of Englishat Stellenbosch University, and a fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa.

This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers.