Overview
- Winner of the 2024 African Studies Review (ASR) Best Africa-Focused Anthology or Edited Collection Prize
- Brings together chapters documenting diverse societies and naming practices in Africa
- Explores the epistemic value of African names, contributing to unveiling endogenous forms of knowledge
Part of the book series: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (GCSAD)
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About this book
Focusing on the epistemic value of African names, this edited collection is based on the premise that personal names constitute valuable sources of historical and ethnographic information and help to unveil endogenous forms of knowledge. The chapters assembled here document and analyze personal names and naming practices in a slew of African societies on the geographically vast and ethnically diverse continent, including contributions on the naming practices in Angola, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. The contributors to this anthology are scholars from different African language communities who investigate names and naming practices diachronically. Taken together, their work offers a comparative focus that juxtaposes different African cultures and reveals the historical and epistemic significance of given names.
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of Names is a timely and ground-breaking collection of cutting-edge perspectives on epistemic affirmation across Global Africa. The interdisciplinary meeting of the humanities and social sciences provokes an intellectual curiosity that should take readers to a deeper questioning of the origins and values of the naming in their evolving social contexts.”
-N'Dri Therese Assie-Lumumba, Professor of Africana Studies and and Director of the Institute for African Development (IAD) at Cornell University
“a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Africans document, archive, preserve, and update their knowledge.”-Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Oyeronke Oyewumi is Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, New York and the winner of the African Studies Association’s 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award. A renowned gender scholar, Oyewumi is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, and What Gender is Motherhood: Changing Yoruba Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. She is the editor of a number of books, including African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, and Gender Epistemologies: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities, and was the founding editor of the Palgrave book series Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora.
Hewan Girma received her Ph.D. in Sociology and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from Stony Brook University, New York. She is currently Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Ethiopian, East African and Indian Ocean Research Network. Her work has been published in Social Problems, Sociology Compass, the Journal of Black Studies, and the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Naming Africans
Book Subtitle: On the Epistemic Value of Names
Editors: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Hewan Girma
Series Title: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13475-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13474-6Published: 09 June 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13477-7Published: 09 June 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-13475-3Published: 08 June 2023
Series ISSN: 2946-3793
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3807
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 220
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: African Culture, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, general