Ujamaa and Ubuntu: Conceptual Histories for a Planetary Perspective

The world has experienced an accelerating erosion of a language that took hundreds of years to emerge, accompanied by colonialism, imperialism, racism, exploitation, and unequal distribution of resources. The book argues for a reformulation of the term 'global' away from its close connection to the globe as an unbounded self-propelling market and towards a connection to the planet, Terra, the Earth. It suggests that a new conceptualization of 'the global and 'the planet requires input from African and Asian language cultures and explores the history of the two political African key concepts of ujamaa and ubuntu to demonstrate how work on a new global/planetary narrative might look. Translations of political key concepts are the source of a growing understanding of difference.

Format: Hardback
Length: 10 pages
Publication date: 06 December 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

For over a decade, the world has witnessed a rapid decline of a language that took centuries to evolve. It is a language that orders time and space through words like enlightenment, reason, rationality, modernization, and the latest buzzword, globalization. However, this language has been intertwined with colonialism, imperialism, racism, the exploitation of people and nature, an unequal distribution of global resources, pogroms, genocides, and world wars. There has been a significant gap between the assumptions underlying a visionary ambition and the often-brutal practices that have accompanied it. Moreover, this language represents European values, suggesting that they apply to the entire world, a civilizing mission from a European center. While the established narrative claimed continuous progress, it was a hindsight conclusion. The concept of progress had to be continually reimagined through new visionary projects that aimed to fulfill the lofty ideals that their predecessors failed to attain.

Against this meta-normative point of departure, the book argues that a compelling grand narrative has failed to materialize since the discrediting of globalization. In the quest for a new narrative, it advocates at a meta-normative level for a reformation of the term 'global' away from its close association with the globe as an unbounded self-propelling market that exists beyond human influence. 'Global should no longer be reduced to auto-playing market fiction but instead be connected to the planet, Terra, the Earth. Drawing upon Latour and Chakrabarty, 'global and 'planetary mean cohabitation; life on earth is viewed as an infinite symbiotic system, nurtured and protected but also destroyed.

Weight: 371g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032641515