Page 11 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

Apart from serving as a counter- discourse to nativising discourses, What is Africanness? is also an attempt to fill a theoretical gap in African identity discourses. Much has been written about the generality of the African subject – its shared ‘public identity’. However, very little has been written about the African subject and its experience of radical uncertainty
– its ‘lived subjectivity’, specificity, complexity and, above all, its plurality which, as Achille Mbembe emphasises, defies convergence towards a single trajectory. Moreover, little has been written about the commensurability of mutual recognition between different social identities.
This book is about developing
theory and method for closing this gap. It advances a theory of African social or cultural identity in ways
that account for, rather than erase
or gloss over, historical agency and fluidity, multiplicities of cultural repertoires and the commensurability of differences within African identifications. Ultimately, What
is Africanness? seeks to develop a theoretical archive of self-naming
that enlarges the human freedoms of Africans.
In 2018, Pretoria University Law Press published its 200th title, a landmark publication by Charles Ngwena, a staff member in the Centre. His
book, What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, fits squarely into contemporary discussions on race and identity in South Africa.
Open access scholarship and human rights
Through its regular academic journals, edited and published from within the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, and through the Pretoria University Law Press (PULP), the Centre has been advancing accessible and quality human rights African scholarship.
All Centre and PULP publications are available online in electronic format at no charge. Professor Frans Viljoen, Director of the Centre, writes that ‘Open-access publication in Africa is both an ethical and practical imperative. Such publications remedy the defect of inadequate libraries on the continent, and allow greater inclusion of Africans in the use and production of scholarship’.
Through PULP, the Centre publishes three journals with a focus on human rights in Africa: the African Human Rights Law Journal, now in its 18th year; the African Disability Rights Yearbook which, in the six years of its existence, has established itself as a unique and important source on disability rights in Africa; and the African Human Rights Yearbook, of which two volumes have already appeared. The three African Union human rights bodies
– the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child – collaborate in this joint publication.
In addition to publishing books, and the three journals, PULP also publishes Pretoria Student Law Review and De Jure.
9