Using decolonial and postcolonial nego-feminism, Postcolonial Imbusa: Bemba Women's Agency, and Indigenous Cultural Systems examines the daily lives of Bemba women and how imbusa has defined the behaviors and relations between women and men at home, church, and work.

"What is development? Who defines that one community/ country is "developed", while another community/ country is "under-developed"? What is the relationship between religion and development? Does religion contribute to development or underdevelopment in Africa? These and related questions elicit quite charged reactions in African studies, development studies, political science and related fields. Africa's own history, including the memory of marginalisation, slavery and exploitation by global powers ensures that virtually every discussion on development is characterised by a lot of emotions and conflicting views. In this volume scholars from various African countries and many different religions and denominations contribute to this debate."--

This book is on the re-imagination of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and practices in 21st century Africa. Framed from an anti-colonial perspective, the book critically interrogates epistemological erasures and injustices meted against African IKS and practices. It magnifies the different contexts where African IKS were and continue to be used effectively for collective and personal benefit. Beyond the legitimate frustration and disheartenment expressed by the contributors to this volume over the systematic colonial efforts to render inferior and delegitimate African systems of knowing and knowledge production, the book makes an important contribution to the quest to correct misconceptions and misrepresentations by Eurocentric thinkers and practitioners about African indigenous knowledges. The book makes an informed claim that the future and vibrancy of African indigenous knowledge and practices lie in how well scholars of knowledge studies and decoloniality in and on Africa are able to join hands in articulating, debating and fronting their vitality and relevance in varied real-life situations. More importantly, the book provides a re-invigorated overview and nuanced analyses of the important role and continued relevance of African IKS and practices in the understanding, interpreting and tackling of the social unfoldings of everyday life and dynamism. Without romanticising African IKS and practices, the book provides added insights and pointers on policy and trends. It is an important addition to critical debates on knowledge studies across fields.

The African museum landscape is changing. A new generation of scholars and curators is setting international standards for the reappraisal and revision of colonial collections, the conception of curatorial spaces, and the integration of new groups of actors. In the face of the ghostly survival of colonial epistemologies in archives, displays, and architectures, it is a matter of breaking up institutional encrustations and infrastructures, inventing new museum practices, and bringing archives to life. Scholars and museum experts predominantly working in Africa and South America discuss the post/colonial history of museums, their political-economic entanglements, the significance of diasporic objects, as well as the prospects for restitution and its consequences. The contributions to this issue of ZfK are all presented in English. Based on the works of Waverly Duck and Anne Rawls, the debate section is devoted to forms of everyday racism and the way interaction orders of race are institutionalized.

Religion, Gender, and Wellbeing in Africa argues that, in many African societies, ideas and practices of wellbeing and gender relations continue to be informed and shaped by religious epistemologies. The contributors affirm that for many Africans, it is through religio-spiritual frameworks that daily experiences, interactions, and gender relations are understood and interpreted. However, for many African women, religions have functioned as a double-edged-sword. Although they have contributed to the struggle against issues such as colonialism, gender justice, climate justice, and human rights, they have also endorsed and perpetuated sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and the denial of human rights for a wide variety of people on the margins. The chapters within this collection demonstrate that most religions and religious formations in Africa have not yet positioned themselves as forces for wellbeing, gender justice, and security for African women and children. The contributors challenge simplistic and superficial readings and interpretations of religio-spirituality in Africa and call for deeper engagements of the interplay between Africa’s religio-spiritual realities and the wellbeing of women, particularly around issues of gender justice, reproductive health, and human rights.

This volume sets out to explore, propose, and generate feminist theories based on African indigenous philosophies and concepts. It investigates specific philosophical and ethical concepts that emerge from African indigenous religions and considers their potential for providing feminist imagination for social justice-oriented earth communities. The contributions examine African indigenous concepts such as Ubuntu, ancestorhood, trickster discourse, Mupo, Akwaaba, Tukumbeng, Eziko, storytelling, and Ngozi . They look to deconstruct oppressive social categories of gender, class, ethnicity, race, colonialism, heteronormativity, and anthropocentricism. The book will be of interest to scholars of religion, philosophy, gender studies, and African studies.

Imbusa, a rite of passage for marriage among the Bemba people of Zambia, is one of the most salient and resilient rituals that shapes and informs the private and public life. It is one of the most formidable cultural forces that defines behaviors and determines everyday relations between women and men at home, church, and work. Postcolonial Imbusa: Bemba Women's Agency, and Indigenous Cultural Systems by Mutale Mulenga-Kaunda offers a glimpse into the lived imbusa and how the teaching proposes women's agency and subjectivity. Mulenga-Kaunda argues that the salience and resilience of imbusa, despite the contact with various cultures and religions, makes it a critical feminist decolonial resource for constructing life-giving postcolonial womanism. Through combined interviews and philosophical analysis, this book discovers how the knowledge of imbusa was produced and how such knowledge constitutes postcolonial and decolonial nego-feminism.

Despite being central to the project of postcolonialism, the concept of resistance has received only limited theoretical examination. Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi K. Bhabha have explored instances of revolt, opposition, or subversion, but there has been insufficient critical analysis of the concept of resistance, particularly as it relates to liberation or social and cultural transformation. In Postcolonial Resistance, David Jefferess looks to redress this critical imbalance. Jefferess argues that interpreting resistance, as these critics have done, as either acts of opposition or practices of subversion is insufficient. He discerns in the existing critical literature an alternate paradigm for postcolonial politics, and through close analyses of the work of Mohandas Gandhi and the South African reconciliation project, Postcolonial Resistance seeks to redefine resistance to reconnect an analysis of colonial discourse to material structures of colonial exploitation and inequality. Engaging works of postcolonial fiction, literary criticism, historiography, and cultural theory, Jefferess conceives of resistance and reconciliation as dependent upon the transformation of both the colonial subject and the antagonistic nature of colonial power. In doing so, he reframes postcolonial conceptions of resistance, violence, and liberation, thus inviting future scholarship in the field to reconsider past conceptualizations of political power and opposition to that power.

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Environmental Postcolonialism: A Literary Response is an academic investigation of the environmental repercussions of colonial destruction. This volume addresses the complex interplay between postcolonialism and environmental discourse through literature produced in the ex-colonies. This literature is read from the standpoint of ex-colonies within their human and non-human context. The primary objective of this volume is to scrutinize environmental concerns in the light of postcolonial theory, and so it examines works of art from the twin perspective of eco-criticism and postcolonialism which illuminates and underscores how colonizers destroyed and interfered with both nature and culture. Through discussing the intersecting layers of ecocriticism and postcolonial criticism, the volume gestures to new directions and generates a hopeful vision of a decolonized world.

Political Theories of Decolonization provides an introduction to some of the seminal texts of postcolonial political theory. The difficulty of founding a new regime is an important theme in political theory, and the intellectual history of decolonization provides a rich--albeit overlooked--opportunity to explore it.Many theorists have pointed out that the colonized subject was a divided subject. This book argues that the postcolonial state was a divided state. While postcolonial states were created through the struggle for independence, they drew on both colonial institutions and reinvented pre-colonial traditions. Political Theories of Decolonization illuminates how many of the central themes of political theory such as land, religion, freedom, law, and sovereignty are imaginatively explored by postcolonial thinkers. In doing so, it provides readers access to texts that add to our understanding of contemporary political life and global political dynamics.