Jean Godefroy Bidima – författare

Jean Godefroy Bidima's La Palabre examines the traditional African institution of palaver as a way to create dialogue and open exchange in an effort to resolve conflict and promote democracy. In the wake of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the gacaca courts in Rwanda, Bidima offers a compelling model of how to develop an African public space where dialogue can combat misunderstanding. This volume, which includes other essays on legal processes, cultural diversity, memory, and the internet in Africa, offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to become acquainted with a highly original and important postcolonial thinker.

In Africa, the twenty-first century began with new challenges surrounding and regarding philosophicaldiscourses. Questions of economic and political liberation, the displacement of populations and the processof urbanization present ongoing challenges, linked to problems such as endemic diseases and famine, therestructure of the traditional family, gender and the position of women, the transmission of culture frompast to future generations. Changes in labor relations resulting from introduction of financial speculation,cutting edge technologies, and differential access to digital and older cultural forms have placed realdemands on Africans and Africanists working in philosophy.This volume explores the ways in which African philosophies express “transitional acts,” those acts by whichthought interacts with history as it is being made and by which it assures its own renewal in proposingprovisional solutions to historical problems. A transitional act combines both the audacity of confrontationand the novelty of creation, prudence in the face of risks and anticipation in the face of the unexpected.Influential and emerging thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic consider this dual activity in the realm ofcriticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics andhistorical poetics.