1st Edition
Between the Lines Africa in Western Spirituality, Philosophy, and Literary Theory
Africa’s history has been misrepresented by the outside world, especially by the Judeo-Christian West. An awareness of such a bias in historiographical discourse explains much of the difficulty Africans and peoples of African descent have in formulating a viable identity in intellectual discourse. Egypt, not Greece, is the cradle of spirituality, poetics, and metaphysics/philosophy. This book shows how recovering originary Nilotic philosophy is one of the few truly viable ways of rethinking philosophy and literary theory in the wake of the nihilist perspective with which postmodernism and deconstruction have left us. Besides making Africa the epicentre of the future of theory, the book’s uniqueness is that it is, arguably, the first attempt to argue the literary implications/applications of the historiographical discourse that is ‘Black’ Egyptology.
Prolegomenon (Introduction) 1. Discourses of Africa in the West 2. The Dakar-Brazzaville-Stanford Conversation (DBSC) 3. Connections Outside Africa: The Black Americas 4. Empathic Intersubjectivity in Pan-Africanist Fictional Narrativity: Jean Toomer’s Cane, Erna Brodber’s Myal, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising – or, Metaphoric Roots of Philosophy and Literary Theory 5. Rethinking the Future of ‘Black’ Literary Theory: Preliminary Observations
Biography
A. Lassissi Odjo taught English, Postcolonial Literature, African and Afrodiasporic Literatures and Cultures, and French in West Africa, the United States, and Canada for twenty years.
