Category: The African Revolution
I live in Paris and for a long time I have reviewed French books for possible translation by British publishers. One of them was Stephen Smith’s Négrologie: pourquoi l’Afrique meurt for Polity Press in 2005. Smith’s book won public acclaim in France, as well as provoking an angry response in the form of the book […]
The Memory Bank has never truly been a blog. Its purpose has always been self-publishing, the first place to put my papers and videos, and where from the beginning I made my book of the same name available. Now I have decided to blog about a book I want to write in the coming months. […]
Some general and personal considerations Just as the institution of slavery sharpens the political concept of the free citizen by means of contrast (Finley “Between slavery and freedom”), the idea of emancipation suggests a moment of transition to freedom from its antithesis. The abolition movement in the 19th century was a dramatic expression of the […]
The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani Editors, to be published soon by Polity, Cambridge) is the first expression in English of a project that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Much of this theoretical and practical work is unknown in […]
Our moment in history Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half […]
The problem In Architects of Poverty (2009), Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of the recently deposed President, asks why Africans remain so poor compared with the rest of the world. He blames African political elites which from the days of slavery have enriched themselves at the expense of their own people by serving the interests of foreign […]
Contains: 1. Critical anthropology 2. The anthropology of unequal society 3. French Marxist anthropology 4. Feminist anthropology 5. The globalization of apartheid Critical anthropology An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century. The question […]
We are all part of a long struggle between inequality and democracy. They are each other’s opposite. If the democratic goal is for the people most affected by decisions to have the biggest say in their making, this becomes impossible when the resources that they bring to the process are vastly unequal. In the twentieth […]
Martin Konzett made this trailer in East Africa. Thanks to Ken Banks (@kiwanja) for the link.
Africa has become poorer in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated continent around 1900, Africa’s seventh of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average of around 50%. We need to understand this ‘urban revolution’ of unprecedented speed […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
