African Political Thought

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course engages African theoretical and philosophical traditions of politics and critically re-thinks the historically conditioned misperceptions about its peoples and cultures. It examines theoretical and philosophical questions concerning the nature of justice, democracy, identity, power, freedom, and equality as advanced by African thinkers. Because of the distinctiveness of African cultures’ metaphysical and moral conceptions of self and society, we will examine how this distinctiveness impacts conceptions of moral and political agency. We will compare and contrast Western individualism with communal African conceptions of freedom, justice, and communal responsibility. These questions must, then, beg another fundamental question of whether it is ethical for normative political theory and philosophy to seek to strive for a convergence into a universal political/philosophical norm, when these African thinkers conceive of their social and political contexts as different from Western ways of knowing, being, and doing. Finally, the course seeks to address the question, “What is African political thought and philosophy?” The prefix “African” will allow us to challenge the universalizing assumption of Western philosophical/theoretical tradition and simultaneously open an intellectual space to rethink the meaning, occupation, and futurity of philosophy and theory.