Between the Lines: Africa in Western Spirituality, Philosophy, and Literary Theory [Hardcover]

Africas history has been misrepresented by the outside world, especially by the Judeo-Christian West. An awareness of such a bias in historiographical discourse explains much of the difficulty Africans and peoples of African descent have in formulating a viable identity in intellectual discourse. Egypt, not Greece, is the cradle of spirituality, poetics, and metaphysics/philosophy. This book shows how recovering originary Nilotic philosophy is one of the few truly viable ways of rethinking philosophy and literary theory in the wake of the nihilist perspective with which postmodernism and deconstruction have left us. Besides making Africa the epicentre of the future of theory, the books uniqueness is that it is, arguably, the first attempt to argue the literary implications/applications of the historiographical discourse that is Black Egyptology.

Prolegomenon (Introduction)  1. Discourses of Africa in the West  2. The Dakar-Brazzaville-Stanford Conversation (DBSC)  3. Connections Outside Africa: The Black Americas  4. Empathic Intersubjectivity in Pan-Africanist Fictional Narrativity: Jean Toomers Cane, Erna Brodbers Myal, and Ayi Kwei Armahs Osiris Rising  or, Metaphoric Roots of Philosophy and Literary Theory  5. Rethinking the Future of Black Literary Theory: Preliminary Observations

Africas history has been misrepresented by the outside world, especially by the Judeo-Christian West. An awareness of such a bias in historiographical discourse explains much of the difficulty Africans and peoples of African descent have in formulating a viable identity in intellectual discourse. Egypt, not Greece, is the cradle of spirituality, poetics, and metaphysics/philosophy. This book shows how recovering originary Nilotic philosophy is one of the few truly viable ways of rethinking philosophy and literary theory in the wake of the nl#µ