African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism

Book excerpt: A broad range of cultural works produced in traditional and modern African communities shows a fundamental preoccupation with the concepts of communal solidarity and hospitality in societies driven by humanistic ideals. African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism is an inaugural attempt to focus exclusively and extensively on the question of humanism in African art and culture. This collection brings together scholars from different disciplines who deftly examine the deployment of various forms of artistic production such as oral and written literatures, paintings, and cartoons to articulate an Afrocentric humanist discourse. The contributors argue that the artists, in their representation of civil wars, massive corruption, poverty, abuse of human rights, and other dehumanizing features of post-independence Africa, call for a return to the traditional African vision of humanism that is relentlessly being eroded by the realities of postcolonial nationhood.