Special topics in African American literature.

This course will focus on Ubuntu, a form of philosophy prevalent in southern Africa that is more involved in moral issues than on logic and is central to how the individual is defined in relation to society in several parts of the continent (Augustine Musopole; Steve Sharra etc.). How did Ubuntu emerge from African thinking? The original ideas were from John Mbiti but it was Desmond Tutu who coined the term Ubuntu and tried to turn it into a political idea to encourage inclusiveness in the rainbow nation of South Africa. Before Tutu, Malawian philosophers were researching uMunthu as an exploration of how to define a person in the context of a collective ethos (Augustine Musopole; Harvey Sindima). What are the challenges to Ubuntu and the communalism that it promotes? Can there be individualism in the philosophical doctrine of Ubuntu (Grivas Kayange)? Is there a uniquely African way of thinking and seeing the world that constitutes a “philosophy” or a “culture”? Does Africa, in its breadth and diversity, have a history of thought, scientific thinking and knowledge production? How has “modernity” developed on the African continent, and how have western history and traditions influenced modernization in Africa? How does Ubuntu inform leadership, economics and politics (Rita Kiki Edozie; Priscilla Mtungwa Ndlovu)? These are some of the questions that this course will explore. The course will introduce students to debates in the discipline of philosophy, and how those debates have shaped philosophical discourse amongst African thinkers and scholars. It will look at "ethnophilosophy" (or Bantu philosophy) as the discourse that started African Philosophy (Alex Kagame; Janheinz Jahn; Placide Tempels). Ethnophilosophy is based on the assumption that African thought is fundamentally different from Western philosophy. Ethnophilosophy tries to show the oppositions through which African philosophical thought has been defined and characterized: communal, collective thought, which has been opposed to Western philosophy's individual thinkers; emotionality as opposed to the West's analytical spirit; African concepts of time as circular and lacking a distant future dimension as opposed to the West's linear concept of time, elaborated further in the work of John Mbiti on African religion. The approach effectively incorporated aspects of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, with apparent appeal to the concept of Negritude (Léopold Senghor), later subjected to critical review (Cheikh Anta Diop, Marcel Griaule, Julius Nyerere).

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