Negotiating Modernity - Africa's Ambivalent Experience (Hardcover)

A fresh look at Africa's experience of modernity which draws out its wider relevance for social theory, with insights from lusophone and anglophone African scholars. This is the Fourth title in a new scholarly series on Africa today. Africa has been through a particularly ambivalent experience of modernity. Previous research has tended to emphasize its alien nature in Africa and how it has been resisted. This title seeks to show how this tension and the impulse to modernity have contributed to changing African society over the past one hundred years. The contributors look at how Africans negotiated the terms of modernity during the colonial period and are dealing with it in the post-colonial period. They argue that the African experience of modernity is unique and relevant for wider social theory, offering valuable analytical insights. The cases presented cover labour, land rights, religious conversion, internal migration, emigration and the African diaspora.