Michael Neocosmos’ Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics, published by Wits University Press in 2016, has been awarded the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.
The Frantz Fanon Prize is awarded annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of works in or of special interest to Caribbean thought.
Publisher of Wits Press, Veronica Klipp, said she is delighted about the recognition that the book is receiving as it highlights African thought on an emancipatory politics. Political theorist and author of What Fanon Said, Lewis R. Gordon, said Thinking Freedom “is a genuine political treatise: nuanced, erudite, creative, committed and nothing less than a classic of political thought.”
Upon hearing the news, Firoze Manji, Founder of Pambazuka News and publisher of Daraja Press, commented: “This exceptional book finally reasserts the struggle for EMANCIPATION and a universal humanity as being central to an understanding of the history of Africa as well as the essential basis for constructing a future based on humanity, equality and justice. Michael is to be congratulated for reestablishing African people’s contribution to humanity, something that has long been occluded by both Africans and Africanists.”
President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Neil Roberts said: “The concept and phenomenology of freedom are subjects of heated ongoing debates. Michael Neocosmos’s brilliant tome brings this discourse, bringing it to bear on contemporary South Africa. Neocosmos’s methodology distinguishes itself through integrating two bodies of literature: Africana political theory and Euro-French philosophy. The unique descriptions of Steve Biko, Achille Mbembe, Amilcar Cabral, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, along with many others, are exquisite, as are the contextual forays into the Haitian Revolution, the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya, and 1980s South Africa. The result most certainly facilitates actualization of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s motto to shift the geography of reason.”
Professor Michael Neocosmos is Director of the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU) in South Africa. In addition to his many articles, translations, and books, he has dedicated his life to emancipatory struggles, in which he has been involved across the globe and especially on the African continent over the past three decades.
Michael Neocosmos, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics. Johannesburg, SA: Wits University Press, 2016.
Find more info about the book here.
Find more info about this Frantz Fanon Award here.