|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a
Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously
written by early and later diaspora people of African descent.
Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the
Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience,
newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the
trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and
forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and
community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation
of intellectual substance and structure across time, space, and
spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its
centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and
hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical
approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of
imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance. A
critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and
reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and
imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana
peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as
“religion” apart from its intimate connections to social
realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics,
environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To
that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic
relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the
Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors
the deep ruptures that have affected Africana life and the creative
responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists
reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the
nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of
Africa and in the African Diaspora.
Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a
Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously
written by early and later diaspora people of African descent.
Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the
Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience,
newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the
trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and
forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and
community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation
of intellectual substance and structure across time, space, and
spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its
centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and
hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical
approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of
imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance. A
critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and
reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and
imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana
peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as
“religion” apart from its intimate connections to social
realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics,
environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To
that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic
relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the
Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors
the deep ruptures that have affected Africana life and the creative
responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists
reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the
nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of
Africa and in the African Diaspora.
Let My People Live reengages the narrative of Exodus through a
critical, life-affirming Africana hermeneutic that seeks to create
and sustain a vision of not just the survival but the thriving of
Black communities. While the field of biblical studies has
habitually divided "objective" interpretations from culturally
informed ones, Kenneth Ngwa argues that doing interpretive work
through an activist, culturally grounded lens rightly recognizes
how communities of readers actively shape the priorities of any
biblical interpretation. In the Africana context, communities whose
identities were made disposable by the forces of empire and
colonialism-both in Africa and in the African diaspora across the
globe-likewise suffered the stripping away of the right to
interpretation, of both sacred texts and of themselves. Ngwa shows
how an Africana approach to the biblical text can intervene in this
narrative of breakage, as a mode of resistance. By emphasizing the
irreducible life force and resources nurtured in the Africana
community, which have always preceded colonial oppression, the
Africana hermeneutic is able to stretch from the past into the
future to sustain and support generations to come. Ngwa reimagines
the Exodus story through this framework, elaborating the motifs of
the narrative as they are shaped by Africana interpretative values
and approaches that identify three animating threats in the story:
erasure (undermining the community's very existence), alienation
(separating from the space of home and from the ecosystem), and
singularity (holding up the individual over the collective). He
argues that what he calls "badass womanism"-an intergenerational
and interregional life force and epistemology of the people
embodied in the midwives, Miriam, the Egyptian princess, and other
female figures in the story-have challenged these threats. He shows
how badass womanist triple consciousness creates, and is informed
by, communal approaches to hermeneutics that emphasize survival
over erasure, integration over alienation, and multiplicity over
singularity. This triple consciousness surfaces throughout the
Exodus narrative and informs the narrative portraits of other
characters, including Moses and Yahweh. As the Hebrew people
navigate the exodus journey, Ngwa investigates how these forces of
oppression and resistance shift and take new shapes across the
geographies of Egypt, the wilderness, and the mountain area
preceding their passage into the promised land. For Africana, these
geographies also represent colonial, global, and imperial sites
where new subjectivities and epistemologies develop.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Braai
Reuben Riffel
Paperback
R495
R359
Discovery Miles 3 590
|