Postcolonial Identities in Africa (Postcolonial Encounters). This item is unavailable.Postcolonial Identities in Africa (Postcolonial Encounters)

In this book, distinguished anthropologists, political scientists and social historians from Africa, Europe and America make a radical break with much conventional wisdom in postcolonial discourse to explore contemporary African identities in transition.

They look at the colonial legacy and how colonial identities are being reconstructed in the face of deepening social inequality across the continent. They ask how the postcolonial imagination as a highly specific, locally created and historical force reconfigures personal knowledge and how that reconfiguration shapes the moral and religious realities around the uses and abuses of postcolonial power.

Using case-studies, the book explores why postcolonial studies has to enunciate and interpret the distinctive languages of identity politics in all the cultural richness of their specific metaphors. It asks whether the very idea of the postcolonial conceals the continued dependence of African countries? Is the postcolonial thus merely a neo-colonial mystification, a Eurocentric product of Western scholarship in collusion with Western imperialism?

Richard Werbner is Professor of African Anthropology and Director of the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research (ICCR) at the University of Manchester. Among his books are Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey (1989), and Tears of the Dead (1991), for which he received the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He is coeditor-in-chief of Social Analysis and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Southern African Studies, Cultural Dynamics, Journal of Legal Pluralism, and Journal of Religion in Africa. He is also Series Editor of Postcolonial Encounters, a Zed Books series in association with the ICCR, Universities of Manchester and Keele. His distinguished career has included visiting appointments at a number of universities in Africa and North America.