Violence and Non-Violence in Africa

Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the historical and anthropological imagination, as well as in contemporary media representations. At the same time, forms of non-violence, significantly under-represented in theoretical and historical discussions, are an integral part of African social and historical experience and an important dimension of African personhood. The present volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of everyday as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. It also seeks to hold up to scrutiny an occluded history of non-violence that must be restored to our scholarly narratives of the African past and present. To this end, we have assembled a collection of essays, drawn from the fields of political science, history, historiography, anthropology, cultural studies, and art history, many of which endorse an interdisciplinary or regional approach that does justice to phenomena of violence & non-violence by inhabiting the intersections between disciplinary categories of intellectual thought. Our contributors themselves come from a variety of locations, African, European and North American. In addition, the work of a number of Africanists who work in Israel is represented. The volume is wide ranging, both in terms of the historical periods that it covers and in terms of its geographical scope. It makes a crucial contribution to a revitalized understanding of the social and historical coordinates of violence'¬"or its absence'¬"in African settings. The study targets a wide range of academics, students and researchers interested in African history and anthropology, colonialism and postcolonialism, political science and Africanist cultural studies. No other work of scholarship to date addresses the conjunctions, conjectures and coordinates that it stages.Ahluwalia, Pal is the author of 'Violence and Non-Violence in Africa ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415405140 and ISBN 0415405149.