Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family

Book review: African thinkers analyse some of the big issues of our time - race, belonging and identity

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星期二, 十月 3, 2023
Sociology, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, Violence, Life, Politics, Writing, United States Code, Research, History, Lakehead University, Student, Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Identity, Collection, Colonialism, Society, Management, Book, Weaving, Entertainment, Tea, Coloniality of power, Immigration

They are the subject of the book The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging, edited by Benjamin Maiangwa, a political scientist at Lakehead University in Canada.

Key Points: 
  • They are the subject of the book The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging, edited by Benjamin Maiangwa, a political scientist at Lakehead University in Canada.
  • The contributors are academics, mostly early career scholars and doctoral candidates in African and North American universities.
  • In a world increasingly divided by supremacist ideologies, the insights in this collection of essays are highly relevant.

What the book’s about

    • Some of the essays are autobiograpical; some are literary criticism; others scholarly analyses.
    • Among them are ideas about naming, indigeneity, land, citizenship, identitarian disparity, diasporic (un)being, immigration and migration, and the political economy of (un)belonging.
    • The volume is structured into three parts: Identity, Coloniality, and Home; Diaspora, Race, and Immigration; and Belonging: Cross-Cutting Issues.

Critical probing and analysis

    • The chapters inspired by personal experiences do as much critical probing as those framed by hardcore analyses.
    • The contributions don’t sound jointly rehearsed, but represent a form of dialogue.
    • Readers will find a kaleidoscope of interrelated but distinct compelling arguments on matters of race, identity and belonging, and the violent and paradoxical patterns they take in the postcolony.
    • He welcomes readers with questions that invite them to ruminate on place and identity construction and the way it determines relations.

The construction of race

    • It stresses racial signifiers – indigenous, native, white, black – as markers which mask, confuse, distress and misrepresent.
    • In some people they produce false triumphalism and superiority and in others they activate demeaning nervousness.
    • And it is this matter of invented racial/cultural identity that the conversation in chapter 12 of the book foregrounds.

Interconnected humanity

    • This volume is a force in the promotion and celebration of the dignity of human differences.
    • The humanistic ring in this book results from a conviction that the human or spiritual identity trumps all other ones, including institutionalised discriminatory ways of being and exclusionary policies and regulations, all of which enable the questioning of other people’s humanity.
    • The contributors’ insistence is on interconnected human relations and, to borrow from the Canadian novelist and essayist, Dionne Brand, on life –
      It is life you must insist on.