Journal articles: 'African modernity'

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Kruzh Morzhadinu, Da Fonseka Vera. "HISTORICAL RESEARCH OF MODERNISM IN AFRICAN ARCHITECTURE OF LOW-RISE SOCIAL HOUSING." Construction Materials and Products 3, no. 2 (July 10, 2020): 55–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.34031/2618-7183-2020-3-2-55-62.

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the purpose of this study is to examine the emergence of modernism as a cultural response to the conditions of modernity to change the way people live, work and react to the world around them. In this regard, the following tasks were formulated: 1) study the development of modernism on the world stage, 2) identify its universal features, and 3) analyze how the independence of Central and sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with a particularly bright period of modernist architecture in the region, when many young countries studied and asserted their identity in art. The article analyzes several objects of modernist architecture in Africa: urban development projects in Casablanca (Morocco), Asmara (Eritrea), Ngambo (Tanzania). The main features and characteristics of modernism which were manifested in the African architecture of the XX century are also formulated. It is concluded that African modernism is developed in line with the international modernist trend. It is also summarized that modernism which differs from previous artistic styles and turned out to be a radical revolution in art is their natural successor.

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Khokholkova, Nadezhda. "African Diaspora in the USA: History and Modernity." Uchenie zapiski Instituta Afriki RAN 61, no. 4 (December 5, 2022): 115–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.31132/2412-5717-2022-61-4-115-124.

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In the context of the intensification of migration processes, the study of diasporas is becoming more relevant. Historically, Africa has been assigned the status of one of the main providers of human resources. As a result of forced and voluntary migrations of Africans, a global community has been formed. It is called the African diaspora. The geography of African migrations is vast. However, in some countries, African presence and influence on the cultural landscape are more prominent. The United States has become one of the largest recipients of migrants from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The article is devoted to the history of the formation and specifics of the development of African communities in the United States. The author focuses on the meaning and the application of the term “African diaspora.” The sociocultural experience of migrants is not uniform, which necessitated the distinguishing and examination of specific groups within the global African diaspora. The main emphasis is placed on the study of such concepts as “Old African diaspora” and “New African diaspora” in relation to the problem of identity. After analyzing several different definitions, the author comes to the conclusion that the concept of the “African diaspora” is fluid (constantly in progress) and inextricably linked with cultural identity, its preservation, and transformation.

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Marung, Steffi. "Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 41, no. 1 (May 1, 2021): 56–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-8916939.

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AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

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Sides, Kirk B. "“Narratives of Modernity: Creolization and Early Postcolonial Style in Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka”." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 2 (March 23, 2018): 158–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2017.56.

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This article revisits Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1925) in order to make an argument for a different historical approach to the field of African literatures. Often called one of the earliest African novels, I argue that how we read Chaka – especially for what Simon Gikandi calls the novel’s “early postcolonial style” – is indicative of a range of assumptions about Africa and its relationship to modernity. In the article, I explore some of the ways in which Chaka has been made to give precedence to other and mostly subsequent imaginings of both the African postcolonial struggle, as well as African ideas on modernity and national culture. Also, through a brief comparison with Chinua Achebe’s foundational Things Fall Apart, the article explores the possibilities of an African discourse on creolization in Chaka, a discourse that rejects the European colonial-encounter narrative of African and postcolonial modernity.

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GIKANDI, SIMON. "African Literature and Modernity." Matatu 35, no. 1 (2007): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789401205641_002.

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Kruger, Loren. "“White Cities,” “Diamond Zulus,” and the “African Contribution to Human Advancement”: African Modernities and the World's Fairs." TDR/The Drama Review 51, no. 3 (September 2007): 19–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/dram.2007.51.3.19.

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From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, representations of Africans at the world's fairs were often aligned with the colonial cultural logic of contrasting the “savage” Other with the “civilized” subject, illustrating the politics of modernity, racialization, and imperial conquest. Certain showcases, however, at the world's fairs in the U.S. and South Africa—as well as performances in the white urban environments of Chicago and Johannesburg—undid this binary by introducing new spectacular economies depicting African modernities.

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Arap Chepkwony, Adam Kiplangat. "Interrogating Issues of Sexuality in Africa: An African Christian Response." East African Journal of Traditions, Culture and Religion 4, no. 1 (November 6, 2021): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.37284/eajtcr.4.1.457.

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The issues of sexuality have been very contentious in Africa more so after the legalization of same-sex marriages by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2015 under the President Obama reign. Africans have resented the way sexuality is understood and practiced in the west and has termed it un-African. Some scholars and indeed African leaders have argued that the attitude towards sexuality is a modern practice which is being introduced and even forced to Africa by modernity and influenced greatly by the western worldview. In a modern setting, different sexual orientation has been accepted as a lifestyle and has been institutionalized. Although African does not refute the fact that there were and indeed still are people with different sexual orientation, they do not find it right to institutionalize it since according to African culture, this is an abnormality that needs to be corrected, sympathized with and tolerated. To that end, African peoples assisted those with a different sexual orientation to live normal lives as much as possible. At the same time, the community was kind and tolerant and never banished or mistreated them based on their sexual orientation. This paper will attempt to show the attitude taken by the African people, the process of assisting those with different sexual orientation and how they were incorporated into the society. The paper will draw valuable lessons to be learned by modernity and which will correspond to African Christianity in accordance with the teaching of Jesus Christ

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CHRISMAN, LAURA. "American Jubilee Choirs, Industrial Capitalism, and Black South Africa." Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (May 2018): 274–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002187581700189x.

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Focusing on the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an African American singing ensemble that toured South Africa in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals how the transnational reach of commercialized black music informed debates about race, modernity, and black nationalism in South Africa. The South African performances of the Jubilee Singers enlivened debates concerning race, labor and the place of black South Africans in a rapidly industrializing South Africa. A visit from the first generation of global black American superstars fueled both white and black concerns about the racial political economy. The sonic actions of the Jubilee Singers were therefore a springboard for black South African claims for recognition as modern, educated and educable subjects, capable of, and entitled to, the full apparatus, and insignia, of liberal self-determination. Although black South Africans welcomed the Jubilee Singers enthusiastically, the article cautions against reading their positive reception as evidence that black Africans had no agenda of their own and looked to African Americans as their leaders in a joint struggle.

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Twitchin, Mischa. "Concerning “the Eurocentric African Problem” (Meschac Gaba)." Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 276–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0025.

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Abstract Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries. When refracted through the commitments of an avowedly Black artistic agenda, how might these institutions reconceive their understanding of modernism in light of African, diasporic, or Afropean perspectives? How might concerns with African agency be enacted in these cultural spaces as they project historical narratives and produce a “public” memory in their own image? What are the implications of the fact that critical resistance to modes of cultural appropriation may, nonetheless, reproduce a discourse that attempts to immunise itself from the association of modernism with colonialism? In the formation of modernist canons, what role might an example of African conceptual art have to play, even when consigned to a museum’s storage space? This paper explores such questions through the paradoxes engaged by Mechac Gaba’s reflections on his 1997-2002 project, “Museum for Contemporary African Art,” now owned by Tate Modern. In particular, it considers the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional” as this has been constitutive of twentieth-century art history, informing a sense of the African presence within European museums. How might reference to the “contemporary” here relate to the potentials of decolonial cultural politics within such spaces?

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Heydenrych, Pieter W. "Constitutionalism and coloniality: A case of colonialism continued or the best of both worlds?" New Contree 75 (July 30, 2016): 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/nc.v75i0.147.

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This article deals with the concept of constitutionalism in relation to colonialism and modernity, with a specific emphasis upon South Africa and South African constitutional development. The Republic of South Africa transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a democratic regime in 1994 and adopted a constitution that is to contribute in the consolidation of its young democracy. However, amidst continued struggles within the South African polity and an emphasis upon de-colonisation, it is necessary to afford attention to aspects of South African constitutionalism.This article relates a discussion of constitutionalism with coloniality and modernity, and considers the nature of the South African Constitution and constitutionalism in this respect. Attention is afforded to unpacking these concepts and the consideration of alternatives, in order to transform or decolonize South African constitutionalism.In this regard reference is made to the nature of constitutionalism, the context of the South African Constitution and the discussion of three approaches to South African constitutionalism that might be helpful in addressing the contested nature thereof. These three approaches are: transformative constitutionalism, progressive constitutionalism and Ubuntu.The article concludes that no definitive or final solutions can be offered, except to suggest that the continued emphasis of these understandings of constitutionalism could perhaps contribute to the actualization and recognition of a deeper and fuller democratic constitutionalism for South Africa, that will also entail finding a balance between modernity and coloniality, because it is suggested that, in the end, there cannot be a complete divorce between these two worlds. Only in this way, it is suggested, can be moved to a South African constitutionalism that embraces the best of both worlds.

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Levin, Ayala. "Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 4 (December 1, 2016): 447–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.447.

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In the 1960s, Addis Ababa experienced a construction boom, spurred by its new international stature as the seat of both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Working closely with Emperor Haile Selassie, expatriate architects played a major role in shaping the Ethiopian capital as a symbol of an African modernity in continuity with tradition. Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa examines how a distinct Ethiopian modernity was negotiated through various borrowings from the past, including Italian colonial planning, both at the scale of the individual building and at the scale of the city. Focusing on public buildings designed by Italian Eritrean Arturo Mezzedimi, French Henri Chomette, and the partnership of Israeli Zalman Enav and Ethiopian Michael Tedros, Ayala Levin critically explores how international architects confronted the challenges of mediating Haile Selassie's vision of an imperial modernity.

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Foster, Jeremy. "Archaeology, aviation, and the topographical projection of ‘Paradoxical Modernism’ in 1940s South Africa." Architectural Research Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 2015): 133–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1359135515000214.

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At the time of his premature death in 1942, Rex Martienssen, the gifted South African architect who had helped make Johannesburg an outpost of modernism, had just completed a seminal PhD thesis on Greek space, and was documenting the layout of remote African settlements in South Africa's highlands. Martienssen's writings suggest that the link between these disjunct projects was topographical thinking, a form of architectural seeing and thinking that ontologically articulates time, place and culture. His research project was informed by the white colonial national intellectual search for an alternative to the racialised imaginary geography being promoted by white nationalism in the 1930s, a paradoxical modernity that would be progressive and cosmopolitan, yet also respected a timeless order threatened by European modernity. This re-envisioning of the 'place' of Western culture in Africa was encouraged by two seemingly-unrelated engagements with the sub-continent's terrain: archaeology and commercial aviation. Both practices came into their own in Southern Africa during this period, deploying Western technique and rationality in ways that constructed a vision of the subcontinent that unsettled the territorial limits and historical narratives of the post-colony, and inaugurated perceptions of the African landscape as modern and transcultural, yet situated in the Hegelian geographical movement of history. This made it possible to imagine, for the first time, that the topographical organisation of indigenous settlements might yield a spatial logic for new urban areas. A key figure in understanding this multiscalar geo-historical subjectivity was Le Corbusier, who had close ties with Martienssen and what he called le Groupe Transvaal. Le Corbusier's global journeys during the 1930s had made him increasingly interested in the anthropo-geographic traces left by the 'natural order of things' in human environments, and the possibility of a neo-syndicalist world order based on geo-political regions that were latitudinally complementary.

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Newell, Stephanie. "Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (review)." Research in African Literatures 37, no. 1 (2006): 130–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ral.2006.0025.

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Adebanwi, Wale. "The cult of Awo: the political life of a dead leader." Journal of Modern African Studies 46, no. 3 (August 18, 2008): 335–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x08003339.

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ABSTRACTThis essay examines the ‘posthumous career’ of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the late leader of the Yoruba of Nigeria. It focuses on why he has been unusually effective as a symbol in the politics of Yorubaland and Nigeria. Regarding Awolowo as a recent ancestor, the essay elaborates why death, burial and statue are useful in the analysis of the social history of, and elite politics in, Africa. The Awolowo case is used to contest secularist and modernist assumptions about ‘modernity’ and ‘rationality’ in a contemporary African society.

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Geschiere, Peter, and Michael Rowlands. "The domestication of modernity: different trajectories." Africa 66, no. 4 (October 1996): 552–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1160936.

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The following two articles were originally presented at a four-day seminar on the ‘domestication’ of modernity in Leiden and The Hague in June 1995. The aim of the seminar was to compare the different trajectories in which African societies try to appropriate modernity: how they deal with the images and dreams of a modern way of life which flood the continent—the spectacular successes of the few and the deep feelings of disappointment of the many. ‘Modernity's enchantment’—a phrase coined by Jean and John Comaroff (1992)—applies very well to Africa. Jean-Pierre Warnier's remark, in his study of entrepreneurs in west Cameroon (1993), that ‘le goût des Camerounais pour tout ce qui est importé plutôt que produit localement est légendaire’ is true of many if not all African countries. Achille Mbembe (1992) forcefully demonstrates that the popular masses are as intent as the elites on participating in the consumerist rituals of new forms of wealth and power. But it is clear also that this obsession with modernity follows very varied trajectories. Jean-François Bayart (1989) emphasises that the marked consumerism of African elites is not to be seen as just an atavistic outcome of la politique du ventre; rather, it is related to specific imaginaires of the link between wealth and power and to varying pressures ‘from below’ towards redistribution.

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Owomoyela, Oyekan. "Proverbs and African Modernity: Defining an Ethics of Becoming." Yoruba Studies Review 2, no. 2 (December 21, 2021): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v2i2.130132.

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African proverbs have, for good reason, attracted considerable attention from scholars, both African and non-African. One notable testimony to such attention is the international conference in South Africa from which came a monumental collection of scholarly articles now available on CD and in print. Another evidence of the interest the subject has enjoyed among African scholars is the wealth of publications they have produced in recent years, for example, Adeleke Adeeko’s monograph Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature; Ambrose Adikamkwu Monye’s Proverbs in African Orature: The Aniocha-Igbo Experience; Kwesi Yankah’s The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric: A Theory of Proverb Praxis; and my Yoruba Proverbs. In addition, there have been influential articles by Ayo Bamgbose, Lawrence. A. Boadi, Romanus N. Egudu, Kwame Gyekye, Yisa Yusuf, and a host of others whose omission from this rather abbreviated list is not meant as a slight. In a recent conversation, the preeminent paremiologist, Wolfgang Mieder, called my attention to the lineup of articles in the most recent issue of Proverbium [23: 2006], in which four of the five lead articles are by Nigerian scholars (Abimbola Adesoji, Bode Agbaje, George Olusola Ajibade, and Akinola Akintunde Asinyanbola) and on African proverbs, an indication, he said of the present effervescence of, and future potential for, proverb studies and publications on them on African soil. Because of these efforts we now know a good deal about proverbs as a cultural resource, their functionality and the protocols for their usage, but also their artistry-structure, wordplay, imagery, and so forth, especially after calls such as Isidore Okpewho’s (1992) that scholars pay due attention to the aesthetic dimensions of traditional oral forms.

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Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor. "Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946-56." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 188–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25068264.

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This article situates the educational architecture of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in British West Africa in 1946-56 in the context of late British colonial policy. The analysis extends discursive readings of architecture with contemporary literary texts as aspects of what might be termed the material cultural fabric. These different forms of articulation illuminate the sociocultural dynamic underlying the migration of modernism in the postwar era, and the extent to which the movement affected and was appropriated by British colonial enterprise. It also discloses modernism's simultaneous disruption and reinforcement of the objectives of modernity, among which were the ideological and technical systems of British imperial expansion. On this basis, it is argued that Fry and Drew were constrained in their endeavor to resolve the divergent expectations within modernist theory concerning the application of universal principles to local conditions, and thus also in their aim of initiating a legitimate modern African architecture.

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Folkers, Antoni. "Early Modern African Architecture. The House of Wonders Revisited." Modern Africa, Tropical Architecture, no. 48 (2013): 20–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.52200/48.a.fkxy01xv.

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This essay explores the various strands of the advent of Modernity in African architecture. It starts from the assumption that the history of Modernity in African architecture is a complex and rich subject that merits increased scientific attention.

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Stambach. "African Education, Culture, and Modernity Unwound." Comparative Education Review 50, no. 2 (2006): 288. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4091395.

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Osha, Sanya. "Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters." Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 100–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40247464.

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Osha, Sanya. "Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters." Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 100–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/complitstudies.42.1.0100.

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Desai, G. "Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters." Comparative Literature 56, no. 3 (January 1, 2004): 274–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/-56-3-274.

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Oyeshile, Olatunji A. "Modernity, Islam and an African Culture." Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 4, no. 2 (January 13, 2016): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ft.v4i2.1.

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Tonda, Joseph. "Pentecôtisme et “contentieux matériel” transnational en Afrique centrale. La magie du système capitaliste." Social Compass 58, no. 1 (March 2011): 42–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0037768610392731.

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Pentecostalism is depicted as a religious movement at once “pre-modern”, “modern” and “post-modern”. In the case of central Africa, where colonisation has produced a “cultural clash” involving not only material factors (the relationship with goods and money), but also racial, corporal, spiritual and intellectual factors, the “pre-modern” hypothesis of Pentecostalism, related to this “cultural clash” leaves the door open for the renewal of ethnocentrist and colonial culturist ideologies. For African “pre-modernity”, “modernity” or “post-modernity” are the products of ideologies peculiar to Europe’s history and its colonial and post-colonial expansion. The author aims to show that all features of Pentecostalism related to the “cultural clash” in central Africa derive from capitalism, from its mystification and its fetishism.

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Skinner, Ryan Thomas. "Civil taxis and wild trucks: the dialectics of social space and subjectivity in Dimanche à Bamako." Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 17–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990365.

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AbstractThis article presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam's 2004 album, Dimanche à Bamako, meaning ‘Sunday in Bamako’, produced ‘by and with’ world music maverick Manu Chao. I consider how Dimanche à Bamako musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of ‘global modernity’ in postcolonial Africa and its diaspora. ‘Global modernity’ refers to the fraught encounter between local actors and the globalised socio-economic conditions in which modern subjects are increasingly embedded. By framing these local and global tensions in the context of a modern African city, Dimanche à Bamako offers a theoretically sophisticated representation of urban African social space that, while rooted in a particular place (Bamako, Mali) attends to the wider world in which a local sense of place gives way to the wanderlust and anxieties of living and labouring in a globalised world. Through critical application of Lefebvrian and Mande socio-spatial theory and focused analysis of several of the album's tracks, I argue that Dimanche à Bamako elucidates a dialectic of ‘civility’ and ‘wildness’ that shapes the way social space and subjectivity are conceived, lived, and perceived in urban African communities in an era of global modernity.

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Swidler, Ann. "African affirmations: The religion of modernity and the modernity of religion." International Sociology 28, no. 6 (October 25, 2013): 680–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0268580913508568.

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Poesche, Jurgen. "Coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas." Journal of Developing Societies 35, no. 3 (September 2019): 367–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0169796x19868317.

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The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of a common narrative on coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Since scholars tend to focus on either Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, a gap between these important regions has emerged in the literature on coloniality. This article seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comparative perspective on coloniality, and this hopefully will enhance Indigenous African nations’ and Indigenous American nations’ understanding of what needs to be done to overcome coloniality. The article explores three key theses. First, in spite of the differences in the extant societal power structures in the postcolonial African states and the former settler colonial states in the Americas, this article argues that the continued dynamics of coloniality are similar in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. The minority status of Indigenous American nations throughout the Americas renders addressing coloniality more challenging than in Sub-Saharan Africa where Indigenous African nations are in the majority although they generally do not have effective sovereignty. Second, the extant societal power structures associated with both coloniality and occidental modernity have weaponized occidental jurisprudence, natural science and social science to defend and proliferate the status quo assisted by state sovereignty. Addressing coloniality effectively therefore requires a renaissance of Indigenous African and Indigenous American cosmovisions unaffected by modernity. Third, addressing coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas requires the recognition of the comprehensive and supreme sovereignty of the Indigenous African nations in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous American nations in all of the Americas.

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Ugwuanyi, Lawrence Ogbo. "Critiquing Sub-Saharan Pan-Africanism through an Appraisal of Postcolonial African Modernity." Theoria 64, no. 153 (December 1, 2017): 58–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/th.2017.6415305.

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Abstract What vision directs pan-Africanism and which developmental model does it support and promote? To answer this question, the article evaluates pan-Africanism within the demands of African modernity and locates the extent to which pan-Africanism meets the aspiration of African modernity. It argues that pan-Africanism has what amounts to a north-bound gaze and supports development imperialism, and shows that for this reason it is not properly grounded on African realities, the consequence of which is the weakness of African modernity. The article suggests a re-articulation of pan-Africanism through the ideology of pro-Africanism, which holds that autonomy and self-will are two cardinal principles that are fundamental to African self-definition but which pan-Africanism is not in a position to provide because it amounts to a subordination of African difference. It concludes that a redirection of the African vision in this direction is a worthier ideological alternative to pan-Africanism.

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Fast, Anicka. "Understanding Religion and Politics in Africa: A Call for the Re-enchantment of the Scholarly Imagination." Journal of Religion in Africa 49, no. 2 (March 11, 2021): 145–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700666-12340163.

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Abstract In his 2015 book Christianity, Development, and Modernity in Africa, Paul Gifford argues that Christianity in Africa is bifurcated into an ‘enchanted’ and a ‘disenchanted’ form. He presents the conundrum that the enchanted form is pervasive yet incompatible with modernity and consistently ignored by scholars. In this review article I draw on Gifford’s conundrum as a springboard to propose a new angle from which to analyse religion and politics in postcolonial Africa: one that moves beyond received dichotomies between tradition and modernity, public and private life, or this-worldly and otherworldly concerns. The work of Michael Schatzberg, Peter Geschiere, Ogbu Kalu, and Emmanuel Katongole moves in various ways past the oppositions that undermine Gifford’s work. In dialogue with these scholars, I articulate a plea to scholars of religion and politics in Africa to develop an appreciation for the powerful role of the religious imagination in African and global arenas of power.

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Hees, Edwin. "Encountering modernity: twentieth–century South African cinemasandSouth African national cinema." Critical Arts 23, no. 1 (March 2009): 124–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560040902789308.

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Ude, Donald Mark C. "Modernity and the Igbo Lifeworld: Theorizing the Modernization Dynamics of the Igbo World from the Habermasian Framework." Philosophia Africana 20, no. 2 (October 2021): 129–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/philafri.20.2.0129.

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Abstract This article theorizes the modernization dynamics of the Igbo world, using the Habermasian framework. Drawing on Habermas, it argues that Igbo modernity or, more precisely, the transformations associated with Igbo modernization, may be understood in terms of the “uncoupling” of systems from the Igbo lifeworld. Relatedly, it further argues that the crises and pathologies that attend modernity in Igboland owe largely to the “colonization” of the Igbo lifeworld by systems of modernity consequent upon this uncoupling. The article pays special attention to the realm of the lifeworld because it is a neglected sphere in the scholarship on the Igbo (African) experience of modernity. Besides, focusing on the Igbo lifeworld would provide the much-needed contextualized reading—one steeped in Africa—of Habermas’s important but rather rarefied theory of modernity. The significance of the article perhaps lies in this two-pronged engagement—the focus on lifeworld and the attempt to contextualize Habermas.

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Rogacz, Dawid, Donald Mark C. Ude, and Tshepo Mvulane Moloi. "Book Reviews." Theoria 69, no. 170 (March 1, 2022): 114–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/th.2022.6917005.

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Douglas L. Berger, Indian and Intercultural Philosophy: Personhood, Consciousness and Causality. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 240 pp.Joseph C. A. Agbakoba, Development and Modernity in Africa: An Intercultural Philosophical Perspective, Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2019, 405 pp.Adekeye Adebajo (ed.), The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets and Philosophers, Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2020. 655 pp.

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Lazarus, Neil. "Modernism and Modernity: T. W. Adorno and Contemporary White South African Literature." Cultural Critique, no. 5 (1986): 131. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1354359.

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Palmer, Jack. "S.N. Eisenstadt and African modernities: Dialogue, extension, retrieval." European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 2 (November 15, 2018): 219–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368431018809546.

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This article elucidates some connections and divergences between S.N. Eisenstadt’s work on multiple modernities and critical reflections on ‘African modernity’ presented by Africanist scholars. It argues that there is more cross-over between these discussions than is commonly thought when both are seen as parallel responses to the shortcomings of post-war modernization theory. Eisenstadt’s work can inform debates in African Studies concerning the effective power of tradition in postcolonial African societies, and on African interpretations of the ‘cultural programme’ of modernity. The article also discusses some weaknesses in Eisenstadt’s theorizing which arise from an extension of the multiple modernities framework to African societies, namely, an underappreciation of the various modalities of colonial imperialism and racialization, as well as the institutional constraints placed on postcolonial societal elites. It claims that these can be offset via a dialogue with the work of scholars in African Studies. Moreover, it is argued that the paradigm of multiple modernities can more satisfactorily shed light on African trajectories of modernity via the retrieval of tenets of Eisenstadt’s ‘heterodox’ modernization theory and work on post-traditionality, outlined in the 1960s and the 1970s, which include specific reflections on African societies.

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Iheka, Cajetan. "Complicated modernity, arrested development: a response to ‘Imagining a Dialectal African Modernity’." Journal of Contemporary African Studies 32, no. 4 (October 2, 2014): 474–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2014.983321.

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Kwateng-Yeboah. "The Prosperity Gospel: Debating Modernity in Africa and the African Diaspora." Journal of Africana Religions 9, no. 1 (2021): 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.9.1.0042.

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Omer, Rabah. "The Modern and the Traditional African Women and Colonial Morality." International Journal of Culture and History 5, no. 1 (June 24, 2018): 30. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijch.v5i1.13311.

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The meanings of modernity have radically shifted over time, yet interestingly, the modern continues to be the modern and the traditional is still the traditional. I address this observation by asking: what is the modern and what is the traditional, how are they identified, by whom, when and according to what premises? I examine one cultural component: women and sexual morality. I focus on women-men relationships, dress, and dance to examine as cultural themes. I focus on African women and colonial morality and I bring examples across different eras and and different regions to discuss the contours of the changing notion of modernity. The signs of modernity have been inconsistent over time and across regions but modernity have always been consistent on particular features that makes it a fluid biased concept.

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Roopnarine, L. "The African diaspora: Slavery, modernity, and globalization." African Affairs 114, no. 454 (November 27, 2014): 168–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adu075.

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Robinson, Jennifer. "Afterword: Modernity and transformation in African cities." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44, no. 1 (March 2008): 89–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449850701820970.

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Adeniran, Adebusuyi Isaac. "The African diaspora: slavery, modernity and globalization." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 49, no. 3 (September 2, 2015): 546–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2015.1071105.

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King, Eric S. "African Americans and the Crisis of Modernity." Ethnic Studies Review 41, no. 1-2 (2018): 53–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/esr.2018.411207.

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This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun by exploring the conflict between a traditionally Southern, Afro-Christian, communitarian worldview and certain more destabilizing elements of the worldview of modernity. In addition to examining the socio-economic problems confronted by some African Americans in the play, this article investigates the worldviews by which these Black people frame their problems as well as the dynamics within the relationships of a Black family that lives at the intersection of racial, class, and gender inequality in Chicago during the latter 1950s.

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Osha, Sanya. "Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (review)." Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 1 (2005): 100–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cls.2005.0018.

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Dickson-Carr, D. "African Americans and the Making of Modernity." American Literary History 25, no. 3 (June 2, 2013): 672–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajt024.

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Ciaffa, Jay A. "Tradition and Modernity in Postcolonial African Philosophy." Humanitas 21, no. 1 (2008): 121–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/humanitas2008211/28.

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Izzo, Justin. "Jean-Marie Teno’s Documentary Modernity: From Millennial Anxiety to Cinematic Kinship." African Studies Review 58, no. 1 (March 16, 2015): 39–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/asr.2015.3.

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Abstract:This article examines discourses and cinematic representations of modernity in two documentary films by the Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno. In the first of these films,A Trip to the Country(2000), Teno investigates how ideals and aspirations of modernity as a state-sponsored project in Cameroon have their roots in the colonial period, and his film is characterized by a strong sense of anxiety linked to the turn of the millennium. In the second,Sacred Places(2009), modernity is given a different affective resonance and is linked to the pleasure of cinematic consumption in Ouagadougou as Teno situates African cinema in relation to its “brother,” the djembe drum. I argue here that a shift occurs between these two films and their affective engagements with modernity; this is a transition from a sense of millennial anxiety to a thematics of what I call “cinematic kinship.” I ultimately suggest that this shift allows Teno to outline new social roles for the African filmmaker as well as new relationships between African cinema and local publics.

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Kruger, Loren. "Acting Africa." Theatre Research International 21, no. 2 (1996): 132–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300014711.

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I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulent umthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.

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Ward, Kevin. "The East African Revival of the Twentieth Century: the Search for an Evangelical African Christianity." Studies in Church History 44 (2008): 365–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400003727.

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African Christian history in the twentieth century furnishes many examples of what can justifiably be described as revival or renewal. To the extent that Christian evangelization in sub-Saharan Africa was propelled by the European missionary movement, it is not surprising that an important element in revival should be a concern to ground the Gospel in an African milieu, expressive of African cultures and sensibilities, and driven by an autonomous African agency. The missionary forms in which Christianity was expressed came under critical scrutiny. This essay is an examination of the East African Revival, a movement which originated in the Protestant mission churches in the 1930s and which continues to be a major element in the contemporary religious life of Christian churches throughout the region. There has been considerable scholarly debate about whether the East African Revival should best be seen as an ‘importation’ and ‘imposition’ of a western Evangelical revival culture in an African setting, or as marking the emergence of a distinctive ‘African’ religious sensibility expressed within Christian forms. In endeavouring to avoid the implicit essentialism which such polarities often convey, the essay aims to show how the East African Revival can fruitfully be understood as belonging both to the larger Protestant revivalist tradition, while springing out of the distinctive responses of East Africans to the Christian message as they experienced it from within African cultures which were themselves being transformed by colonialism and modernity.

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Krylova, Natalia L. "Between Archaic and Modernity (gender aspect of African culture)." Asia and Africa Today, no. 3 (2022): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s032150750019239-4.

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The article is an analytical review of the materials of the scientific conference "Gender aspects of African Culture: between Archaic and Modernity", held at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences in November 2021. The conference discussed such issues as gender characteristics of the transmission of traditions to the younger generation (archaic and modern forms and methods); the education system in the context of the transmission of universal (European) models of values; reflection of the struggle between traditional and modern in the development of African languages at the present stage. A number of reports were devoted to the problems of traditional art as an integral part of modern cultural forms. The attention of the speakers was focused on the problems of the sacred role and political significance of the activities of representatives of national culture (including their civic position, criticism of the policy of the authorities, the fight against the dictates of religious movements). The problems of cultural interaction within the framework of a mixed family and mestizo children as intermediaries of two cultures occupied a large place in the work of the conference. Considerable attention was paid to the issues of feminism as an expression of women's self-realization and self-identification, the struggle against all forms of exploitation and for the freedom of will of an individual through artistic means, as well as "state feminism" as a radical means in the fight against archaism.

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Fokou-Ngouo, Arthur Freddy. "Mise en texte d’une ville hybride dans Walaande de Djaïli Amadou Amal*: vers une sociocritique de l’espace urbain." Çédille, no. 18 (2020): 463–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.cedille.2020.18.19.

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The colonial event continues to have an important role in literary studies. Thus, this article is part of a context of progressive expansion of the discursive duality coloni-al/post-colonial, Europe/Africa. In her novel Walaande (2010), Djaïli Amadou Amal paints a city of Maroua in the in-between, in the crossing of the European “Modernity” and of the African (peule) “tradition”, with the aim to give a hybrid and more attractive tone to the city of the future in general. Thus, through a sociocriticism of the literary space, we highlight the positive influence of “Modernity” in the implementation of future urban policies.

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Bishwende, Augustin Ramazani. "The Church, family of God in Africa, to the challenges of global modernity." Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira 82, no. 322 (July 21, 2022): 444–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.29386/reb.v82i322.4238.

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In the current context of the deep crisis within Roman Catholicism, has really been put to the challenges of the Gospel the Church, a family of God? Doesn’t the African ecclesiology of the family of God run to the challenges of global modernity? If African bishops recognize the theological relevance of this paradigm for pastoral care and catechesis, how can this paradigm help to solve many questions such as the celibacy of priests in Roman Catholicism, the problem of marriage for all or homosexuality in the Church today, and that of remarried divorcees? The Church, Family of God, the community of love, leads to hermeneutics that in Africa it must become Light of God and Light of men in the midst of our world in the making. It is by accepting to be the Lord’s Easter that she can enter modernity and assume it, that she can embrace all sinners. It is a Church of sinners saved by Christ, anointed of God.

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Journal articles on the topic 'African modernity'

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