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Added by: Björn FreterAbstract: Postmodern and post-analytic understanding of African thought was primarily a shift from attempts to understand African thought using Western conceptual lenses to attempt to understand African framework of thought from the conceptual scheme of the people whose thought was being studied. This paradigm shift in the study of a people’s culture championed by such scholars as Ludwig Wittgenstein – notable in his shift from the pictorial theory of language to the game theory – had and continues to have very successful results in the attempts by sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers to understand African (philosophical) thought. We recall, for instance, the insightful studies of Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Peter Winch, and Robin Horton and the continuous records by ethnophilosophy. What stands out from this shift to conceptual scheme of a people as a means for unraveling their thought and ideas is the importance of language as a factor that cannot be ignored in understanding various aspects of the being, knowing, and acting of a people. This essay follows in this line of reasoning. It focuses on an underexplored area of the role of language in African thought: how language promotes or impedes positive and negative experiences of othering or alterity in African spaces. It argues that language is imperative to understanding the different levels of othering in African societies. It explores four areas where this is obvious: (1) the lack of competence to speak and communicate in the particular language spoken in the African community in which one dwells naturally in others such as person from the community in a manner that may be inimical to her well-being; (2) the ability to speak in a language of an African people to which one was not naturally born to promote positive relation with the self (the speaker) by the other (the community of selves) to the extent of blurring the gap between the self and the other; (3) the power of language to turn a complete stranger to a close friend when two African strangers meet in a foreign land such as in the Diaspora, a friendship formed solely on the basis of the sameness of language; and (4) the manner in which the other in an African place is conceptually represented to express the people’s understanding of and their responsibility toward the other in such a place. The essay concludes that language remains the richest source to explore and the fastest route to follow in the search for a people’s ideas about othering and difference.Comment: This is a stub entry. Please add your comments below to help us expand it
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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was born in British Jamaica, and educated in Oxford. A long-term political activist, especially in anti-racism, he taught at the Open University and was a fellow of the British Academy. He co-created and headed the Creator of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which contributed greatly to the definition and orientation of British cultural studies. In the neoliberal climate of the 1980s, Hall coined the term "Thatcherism", and generally contributed to Marxism as a founder of the New Left Review, developing a Gramsci inspired theory of power and applying textual analysis to the media. He bridged French Theory (Foucault, Derrida) with anglo-saxon race and gender theory. This 1990 paper is one example of Hall as a theorist of the Caribbean experience, diasporas, and more generally of collective cultural identities. Drawing on Senghor and Césaire, he sees in the Caribbean the intersection of several cultural traditions, and argues against an accomplished, transparent understanding of identity, trying to take into account the position of the creator of representations and the situation of discourse on identity. Hall finds two ways of thinking identity: (1) as a collective "true self" which each individual holds within themselves, the essence of which can be studied, and which he finds in Senghor or Césaire ; (2) as a "becoming" rather than a "being" (p. 225-226), in a constant transformation at the intersection of "history, culture and power". This view of identity crosses "the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture", allowing to show how something can be and not be at the same time.
Comment: This is one of Hall's most famous and discussed paper. It elaborates upon other doctrines (Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Said), tracing their actualization in the last decades of the 20th century, and bridging them with cultural studies. It also allows to explore a specific Jamaican approach to the Caribbean, and touches on the difference between French and British post-colonization.