Readings in Modernity in Africa

This book provides students of Africa with a guide to the bewildering variety of scholarly work on the issue of modernity in Africa, and to offer some tools for dealing with its intellectual paradoxes. Part One contains both analytical and historical examples of the genealogies of modernity in the African continent and the fragmentation over time of its unilinear meta-narrative. Part Two provides a set of rich ethnographic sketches of its current manifestations in politics, urban space, technology and the realm of the invisible. What emerges as critically important in this challenging collage of texts, are the varying ways in which modernity actually produces its other - that is, 'tradition'.