Derrida and Africa takes up Jacques Derrida as a figure of thought in relation to Africa, with a focus on Derrida’s writings specifically on Africa, which were influenced in part by his childhood in El Biar.

In the twenty-first century, the idea of race in sports is rapidly changing. The National Basketball Association, for instance, was recently home to a new kind of racial conflict. After a recent playoff loss, Houston head coach Jeff Van Gundy alleged that Yao Ming, his Chinese star center, was the victim of phantom calls, or refereeing decisions that may have been ethnically biased. Grant Farred here shows how this incident can be seen as a pivotal moment in the globalization of the NBA.

This collection of essays provides a critique of C. L. R. James's contribution to a broad range of intellectual pursuits. The Trinidadian-born James was a political activist in the Caribbean, the US and Britain, as well as being one of the leading figures in the early Pan-African movement. He also wrote extensively on literature, culture, cricket, and marxism. This book engages all these aspects of James's life to demonstrate his centrality to the current debates around the issues of postcoloniality and popular culture.

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging.

Sudanese artist, writer, critic, cultural diplomat Ibrahim El-Salahi (born 1930) is one of the critical figures of African and Arabic modernism. While serving as Sudan’s Undersecretary of Culture in 1975, El-Salahi was imprisoned without trial and endured six months of deprivation in the notorious Cooper (now Kober) Prison.

Women and Higher Education in Africa: Reconceptualizing Gender-based Human Capabilities and Upgrading Human Rights to Knowledge is a pioneering book that provides theoretical articulation of the quest for relevant development paradigms and policy conceptualization to address effectively the urgent need for Africa collectively to appropriate the process of genuine progress.

This book provides theoretical tools for analysing contemporary African higher education systems and institutions. It also examines policy challenges and the prospects for social progress. It points to critical areas of investigation for the CODESRIA Multinational Working Group (MWG) research network on higher education. Conceived as a background text for this network, the book traces the historical roots and the global factors of the African higher education crises and the search for transformation to address issues of legitimacy and relevance.

The Burden of Over-representation artfully explores three curious racial moments in sport: Jackie Robinson's expletive at a Dodgers spring training game; the transformation of a formality into an event at the end of the 1995 rugby World Cup in South Africa; and a spectral moment at the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

This collection of essays marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon’s classic study of anticolonial struggle, The Wretched of the Earth. Scholars explore the relevance of Fanon’s work for current modes of psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and political thought. One contributor reposes a classic question of postcolonial scholarship: what does it mean for a colonial Caribbean man to practice a Continental intellectual tradition?

Ngambika is a Tshiluba (Central Africa) phrase whose closest english rendition is "Help Me To Balance This Load." An African woman who has to carry a heavy load often asks another woman to help her lift it onto her head while she finds the correct posture and balance to choulder the weight herself. In most cases, the load is within her capability, so she balances it herself without assistance.

In this sweet coming-of-age tale, Carole Boyce Davies captures the legend of a man on a secret mission to speed walk around his majestic Caribbean island. But is this rapid moving rebel a madman or are we the crazy ones for standing still while life passes by? Is our speed walker a man ahead of his time? Get ready, get set to go on a high speed tour of your favorite Caribbean island, seen through the eyes of a Caribbean girl.

Amidst the euphoria about the new frontiers of technology sometimes perceived as a panacea for expansion of higher education in developing countries, there is a need to analyze persistent and new grounds of unequal opportunity for access, learning, and the production of knowledge.

Whom does society consider an intellectual and on what grounds? Antonio Gramsci’s democratic vision of intelligence famously suggested that “all men are intellectuals,” yet within academic circles and among the general public, intellectuals continue to be defined by narrow, elite criteria. 

Since he was a young adult, Grant Farred has wandered the world.  Born in South Africa, his own personal growth was fueled by dreams of English football, as a player, and then, when age and reality set in, as a fan.  Coming to the United States at a still young age, Farred still loved football -- especially Liverpool -- and watched it from afar.  Writing about his experience, Farred shares with the reader his experience growing up colored in South Africa, moving to England, and finally to the US, and how his passion for footba

The Politics of Spanish American "Modernismo" elucidates the professional and literary means through which Spanish American modernistas negotiated a cultural politics of rapprochement with Spain and Europe in order to differentiate their Americanness from that of the United States. Gerard Aching argues that these turn-of-the-century men of letters were in fact responsible for the burgeoning role that intellectuals and writers had (and continue to have) in defining pan-Hispanicism.

Does the mask reveal more than it conceals? What, this book asks, becomes visible and invisible in the masking practiced in Caribbean cultures -- not only in the familiar milieu of the carnival but in political language, social conduct, and cultural expressions that mimic, misrepresent, and mislead?

This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men―often contradictory ones―have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright preacher.

Legal Naturalism advances a clear and convincing case that Marx's theory of law is a form of natural law jurisprudence. It explicates both Marx's writings and the idea of natural law, and makes a forceful contribution to current debates on the foundations of law.

Why hasn't Africa been able to respond to the challenges of modernity and globalization? Going against the conventional wisdom that colonialism brought modernity to Africa, Olúfémi Táíwò claims that Africa was already becoming modern and that colonialism was an unfinished project. Africans aspired to liberal democracy and the rule of law, but colonial officials aborted those efforts when they established indirect rule in the service of the European powers.

This book reevaluates "international knowledge" in light of recent scholarship in the fields of hermeneutics, ethnography, and historiography regarding the non-West, the past, and the present of international society. Countering the disciplinary skepticism about political possibilities outside of the strictures of modern Western forms, it proposes formulations of power, interest, ethics, and subjectivity by a group of African intellectuals as plausible alternatives to official French and American postwar proposals for world order.

This book presents the case for a conceptual and pragmatic revolution of Africa’s formal educational systems. Using the context of Ubuntu-inspired education, the authors explore innovative ways to tackle the challenges faced by governments from the local and national level and beyond. Along the way, the editors and their contributors examine important policy questions to encourage fresh thinking on ways to improve the educational system and, in turn, to buoy the development of the region as a whole.

Abstract International justice is not merely a function of legislation and adjudication. It depends on the extent to which it is viewed as legitimate by litigants and others based on perceptions of the relationships of the operations of existing regimes of dispensation of justice. This is a reflection of the operations of the institutions of justice and those of the international order: including but not limited to the actions of judicial authorities and other judicial auxiliaries and intermediaries who give effect to justice through their interpretation and application of the law.

Greater understanding of the forms and consequences of investment and disinvestment in the extractive industries is required as a result of capitalist expansion, recent declines in global commodity prices, and claims that extractive sector projects, especially in the global south, are poverty reduction projects. This book explores emergent forms of governance in mining and extractive industry projects around the world. 

African women's rights, in its early expressions, was linked to the critique of particular economic/class systems which disempowered the majority of women in contemporary Africa. However, the discourse was subsequently dominated by a move towards feminist politics as cultural politics. The way gender and class intersect in an African context continues to be an ongoing critical lever of analysis, despite some recent turns in the study of African gender systems that have evaded class as a critical variable.
Gender/Class Intersections and African Women's Rights. 

This collection is, in the best sense of the term, a homage to Valentin Mudimbe. The festschrift's essays honor the intellectual legacy of Mudimbe - for decades now, one of Africa and the diaspora's most significant minds - by taking up the challenges his work poses, be they ethical, political, philosophical, literary, sociological, anthropological, or psychological challenges.