This book brings together top researchers, thinkers, and activists from across disciplines to reflect on the study of Africa. Critical Dimensions of African Studies: Re-Membering Africa emphasizes a critique of power structures, the promotion of human liberation, a commitment to social justice and transformation, and critical reflection on the politics of the production and circulation of knowledge of Africa. The editors, Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Tom Spencer-Walters, organize the book around three related key themes: international/transnational, humanistic, and combined critical theory and practice perspectives. They argue that each theme represents an important dimension of contemporary African and African diaspora studies and re-centering these themes within the discipline will help to advance the field. The diverse contributors capture the goal and method for re-membering Africa by reflecting and defining the field from various disciplines in order to consider the history, the critical debates, and the challenges to current views of the status and future direction of African studies.

African philosophy has for long been rejected on the basis that it is not known, or has not been written down. Behind this view is the idealist presumption that for something to exist, it must first be perceived. However, for something to be perceived, it must first exist. African Philosophy: Critical Dimensions examines what constitutes African philosophy in terms of its meaning, foundation, sources, methodology, characteristics, and relevance. The book analyses traditional African philosophy from the political, social, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical angles. The book further critically discusses modern African political philosophy, modern African social philosophy, modern African economic philosophy, and modern African philosophy of religion. It ends with the identification of the different conclusions that were derived from the study and general recommendations, some specifically for researchers and writers, especially in the area of African philosophy. Wilfred Lajul joins other authentic voices examining African Philosophy.

African American Studies: The Discipline and Its Dimensions is a comprehensive resource book that recounts the development of the discipline and provides a basic reference source for sixteen areas of knowledge.

This textbook is the first of its kind, offering instruction on how to conduct culturally relevant critical research on Africana communities in the American context, in addition to the African diaspora. It contains a collection of the most widely used theories and paradigms designed for exploring, explaining, and advancing Africana communities through science.

Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and Paradigms of Knowledge is both a reader and an introspective tribute, comprised of writings by James Turner and commentary from several of his former students. The book strives to underscore critical connections between multiple dimensions of Turner’s legacy (as scholar, activist, institution-builder, teacher, and mentor), while also aiming to contribute to the growing historicized literature on the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The contributors to this book hope to influence this early phase in Black/Africana Studies historiography and provide a resource for discourse on the future of the discipline.

Facing South to Africa is a bold synthesis of the ideas that have made Afrocentric theorists the leading voices of the African renaissance. Written from the vantage point of the philosophical and political discourse that emerged over the past twenty-five years, this is a highly readable and accessible introduction to African social and cultural criticism. Molefi Kete Asante engages in the practice of critical thinking by raising fundamental questions about how Africans view themselves and the world. Tackling the themes of culture, education, social sciences, the university, politics, African unity, and the prospects for peace in Africa, Facing South to Africa is a fresh, daring, and popularizing synthesis of the best critical thought on the issues of modern knowledge. Asante’s plan is to reorient our thinking on Africa by asking questions of Africa and Africans rather than imposing preconceived, external ideas on African issues.

Branches of Asanteism explores the epistemologies and research methodologies that have sprung from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante’s treatises on Afrocentricity. The book identifies and analyzes thirteen such epistemologies and methodologies while defining and explicating the various “branches” of Asante’s idea of Afrocentricity.

For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.

While there is a wealth of scholarship on Africana Education, no single volume has examined the roles of such important topics as Black Male Identity, Hip Hop Culture, Adult Learners, Leadership at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Critical Black Pedagogy, among others. This book critically examines African Americans in higher education, with an emphasis on the social and philosophical foundations of Africana culture. This is a critical interdisciplinary study, one which explores the collection, interpretation, and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in the field of higher education. To date, there are not any single-authored or edited collections that attempt to research the logical and conceptual ideas of the disciplinary matrix of Africana social and philosophical foundations of African Americans in higher education. Therefore, this volume provides readers with a compilation of literary, historical, philosophical, and communicative essays that describe and evaluate the Black experience from an Afrocentric perspective for the first time. It is required reading in a wide range of African American Studies courses. Perfect for courses such as: African American Social and Philosophical Foundations | African American Studies | African Nationalist Thought | History of Black Education

This book unites a dynamic group of scholars who examine linkages among local, national, and international levels of educational policy and practice. Utilizing multi-sited, ethnographic approaches, the essays explore vertical interactions across diverse levels of policy and practice while prompting horizontal comparisons across twelve sites in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The vertical case studies focus on a range of topics, including participatory development, the politics of culture and language, neoliberal educational reforms, and education in post-conflict settings. Editors Vavrus and Bartlett contribute to comparative theory and practice by demonstrating the advantages of thinking vertically.