In Africa, the twenty-first century began with new challenges surrounding and regarding philosophical
discourses. Questions of economic and political liberation, the displacement of populations and the process
of urbanization present ongoing challenges, linked to problems such as endemic diseases and famine, the
restructure of the traditional family, gender and the position of women, the transmission of culture from
past to future generations. Changes in labor relations resulting from introduction of financial speculation,
cutting edge technologies, and differential access to digital and older cultural forms have placed real
demands on Africans and Africanists working in philosophy.
This volume explores the ways in which African philosophies express “transitional acts,” those acts by which
thought interacts with history as it is being made and by which it assures its own renewal in proposing
provisional solutions to historical problems. A transitional act combines both the audacity of confrontation
and the novelty of creation, prudence in the face of risks and anticipation in the face of the unexpected.
Influential and emerging thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic consider this dual activity in the realm of
criticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics and
historical poetics.
