Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire

International Journal of Francophone Studies

Volume 18 Numbers 2&3 2015

Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire

Guest edited by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (University of Warwick)

This monumental volume brings together a roster of international scholars from Africa, North America, the United Kingdom, France and India, to critically examine philosophical practices in Francophone Africa since the late 1930s. Whether or not ‘African philosophy’ can be defined as an autonomous discipline, whether or not philosophy can be restricted by geography (Crépon 1996), there is no doubt that ‘philosophising’ has always taken place in Africa. It has in the past forty years generated interest, particularly in the North-American academia, favouring the analytic approach over those usually adhered to in the ‘continental’ tradition. The Francophone input is often mentioned superficially in the English-language corpus. This volume aims to correct this imbalance by looking at the overlapping concerns of various schools of thought. The scope here is wide-ranging, testing out the regional and linguistic boundaries of ‘African Francophone philosophy’. It demonstrates that this field has been supported by figures cutting across conventional racial divides, with an ability to move beyond the Francophone / Anglophone demarcation line and reconnect with canonical Western philosophies.

Contributions

Introduction. “African Philosophy and Francophone Cultures: chronological perspectives” (Pierre-Philippe Fraiture); “Colonial Ethnography as a Strategy for Self-Writing: the case of Paul Hazoumé’s Doguicimi (1938)” (Kusum Aggarwal); “Les Statues meurent aussi’: the death and after-death of African art” (Pierre-Philippe Fraiture); “L’usage de l’Antiquité chez Cheikh Anta Diop et l’ombre menaçante de Senghor” (Bernard Mouralis); “Oedipus in Africa: Mudimbe and Classical Antiquity” (Daniel Orrells); “On the Predicament of Africanist Knowledge: Mudimbe, Gnosis and the challenge of the Colonial Library” (Zubairu Wai); “L’Afrique dans le monde, le monde depuis l’Afrique: lectures croisées d’Achille Mbembe et de Célestin Monga” (Anthony Mangeon); “Reconstruire la philosophie africaine: à la recherche des lieux d’ancrage d’une pensée du futur” (Kasereka Kavwahirehi); “The Equivocal Concept: the work of Bourahima Ouattara” (Jean-Paul Martinon); “The Singer of Pain: suffering and subversion in the poetry of Sando Marteau” (Alena Rettová); “‘Philosophie africaine’: histoire d’une expression” (Souleymane Bachir Diagne)

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Kamal Salhi (University of Leeds) International Journal of Francophone Studies