Emerging Perspectives on ‘African Development’: Speaking Differently (Counterpoints)

Emerging Perspectives on ‘African Development’: Speaking Differently discusses numerous areas of interest and issues about Africa, including contemporary challenges and possibilities of development. The book critically engages the many ways of presenting ‘development,’ highlighting the interplay of tradition and modernity as well as contestations over knowledge production in ‘post-colonial’ Africa. It offers cautionary words to field practitioners, researchers, and social theorists who work in development using language that is easily accessible to laypersons. This book is also for undergraduate and graduate courses on development, global education, rural development, and Africa studies. For readers looking for something new about Africa beyond the old stories of catastrophes and human misery, this book will be indispensable. It demonstrates that even in the face of many failures, tragedies, and suffering, Africa’s stories can be told with hope and a sense of possibility.

George J. Sefa Dei is an educator, researcher, and writer. Currently, he is Professor of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT). His teaching and research interests are in the areas of anti-racism, minority schooling, international development, anti-colonial thought, and Indigenous knowledge systems, and he has published extensively in these areas. He edited an international reader, Indigenous Philosophies and Critical Education (Peter Lang, 2011) and co-edited Contemporary Issues in African Science Education.
Paul Banahene Adjei is a Ghanaian Canadian. Currently, he is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. His recent work includes «When Blackness Shows Up Uninvited: Examining the Murder of Trayvon Martin through Fanonian Racial Interpellation» in Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: A Critical Reader (Peter Lang, 2014). His teaching and research interests include critical race and anticolonial readings of violence and nonviolence, leadership and social justice, spirituality and social work practice, and alternative discourses in development.