This handbook explores essential philosophical questions about the experience of difference and the other in African societies. The contributions go beyond a mere discussion of empirical manifestations. They offer a critical analysis of, among other things, the very nature and essence of difference that makes such manifestations possible. Coverage examines the philosophical basis for the African contexts of gender differences, bodily differences and disability; racial, religious, and cultural differences; xenophobia and xenophilia; and issues of the otherings of non-human beings from human beings.
These insightful analyses detail the ontological, epistemological, and moral foundations of difference and alterity in African societies, both traditional and modern. Readers will gain a deeper understanding into such questions as: What value is placed on the other in African societies? What is the ethics and burden of care for those considered different in African societies? What role does language play in the othering of the other in African societies? What is the nature and challenges of the alleged White-Black difference.
This exploration offers a vital contribution to the philosophy of difference. It not only shows the importance of place in such theorization. It also contributes significantly to African philosophical discourse. This handbook will interest both undergraduate, postgraduate students, and researchers in such fields as African studies/philosophy, identity, racism and alterity studies in sociology, feminism and LGBT studies.
Dr Lindsay Kelland is a feminist philosopher and senior lecturer based in the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics, Rhodes University (South Africa), and has recently published a chapter on the Other in South Africa in this handbook. In this chapter, she outlines what she takes to be the dominant picture of “the Other” underpinning the public imagination in South Africa today – the Other as not only different from the self but as also threatening and alien to the self. In order to provide this picture, she traces the history of the concept of the Other as it developed on the European continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring how different spaces were opened up in which to think about the Other and the role of the Other in our lives, spaces that were then taken up by African(a) existentialist philosophers and feminist philosophers. She argues that an unfortunate by-product of this line of thinking is that the public imagination in South Africa today is at least tacitly informed by an image of the Other as alien from and ultimately threatening to the self. The Other has become a problem for us, and this is apparent in the ways in which we approach and respond to one another, or fail to, as the case may be. Kelland proposes the need to consciously shift the ways in which we think about the Other from this dominant, if often tacit, image of the Other as a problem, to an image of the Other as necessary for our liberation from ideological shackles, necessary for psychological freedom. This is by no means a new line of thought, but the need to consciously shift our ways of thinking about the Other, and thereby, each other is, in South Africa at this time, urgent for both epistemic and ethical reasons.
The book is available to pre-order here.