This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded “frontier African” at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.

This book is a timely addition to debates and explorations on the epistemological relevance of African proverbs, especially with growing calls for the decolonisation of African curricula. The editors and contributors have chosen to reflect on the diverse ways of being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress by drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe's harnessing of the effectualness of oratory, especially his use of proverbs in his works. The book recognises and celebrates the fact that Achebe's proverbial Igbo imaginations of being and becoming African are compelling because they are instructive about the lives, stories, struggles and aspirations of the rainbow of people that make up Africa as a veritable global arena of productive circulations, entanglements and compositeness of being. The contributions foray into how claims to and practices of being and becoming African are steeped in histories of mobilities and a myriad of encounters shaped by and inspiring of the competing and complementary logics of personhood and power that Africans have sought and seek to capture in their repertoires of proverbs. The task of documenting African proverbs and rendering them accessible in the form of a common hard currency with fascinating epistemological possibilities remains a challenge yearning for financial, scholarly, social and political attention. The book is an important contribution to John Mbiti's clarion call for an active and sustained interest in African proverbs.

Feasting seems to be an inseparable element of peoples’—especially their collective—lives. ___|___ The proposed volume consists of original unpublished texts in which their Authors search for the answers to the following questions: How far have we gone astray from the primeval idea of celebrating the feast, from understanding tradition in terms of the Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, or the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim? Are there still any traditional, in its very meaning, feasts? If not—if they are invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983] 1992)—why are they called “traditional”? What elements have changed and why? What has had the greatest impact on celebrating feasts? What are the new factors influencing the course of a feast’s celebration? ___|___ It was difficult to categorize the texts contained in this book because the subjects discussed in them very often overlap. Still, it was possible to recognize several accentuated aspects that served as the basis for the division of the book into three sections: 1) Culture and Identity; 2) Ritual and Cultural Values; 3) Culture and Policy. The contributors are scholars who represent various international institutions and fields of research, and use different approaches and methodologies to study the subject of the feast. This publication is an opportunity to bring the results of their research together in one book. The volume contains chapters in which various aspects of feasts, festivals, and festivities perceived as a mirror of social and cultural changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are presented. It provides a unique and rich resource in the fields of culture, folklore, religion, anthropology, sociology, as well as politics and other cultural and social sciences. In the future, we hope to broaden the scope of our research and to include more ethnic groups and their cultures in order to see the changes they have undergone and factors that caused them. _____ TABLE OF CONTENTS _____ Frédéric Armao (University of Toulon, France), Uisneach: from the Ancient Assembly to the Fire Festival 2017 | Key words: Bealtaine, folklore, Irish festivals, mythology, Uisneach _____ Bożena Gierek (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland), Lajkonik (Hobby Horse) as Theatrum of the Period of Corpus Christi in Kraków (Poland) | Key words: Corpus Christi, feast, Lajkonik, raftsmen, theatrum _____ Tatiana Minniyakhmetova (University of Tartu, Estonia), Manifestation of Various Values in Traditional Udmurt Feasts | Key words: “beestings,” feast, porridge-meat, symbols, Udmurts _____ László Mód (University of Szeged, Hungary), Grape Harvest Feast as an Attempt to Develop Local Identity and Cultural Heritage. The Hungarian Case | Key words: cultural heritage, grape harvest feast, invented tradition, local identity _____ Marek Moroń (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland), The Use of Sacrifice Feast of Eid ul-Adha in Bengal as an Instrument of Promoting Communal Violence for Political Purposes. The Situation in the 1920s, 1930s and 2017 | Key words: Bengal, cow sacrifice, Eid ul Adha, Hindu, Muslim, politics _____ Ewa Nowicka (University of Warsaw, Poland), Performing Ethnicity: Buryat Ethnofestivals and a Rediscovered Tradition | Key words: Buryatia, cultural canon, ethnofestival, identity, rediscovered tradition _____ Alīna Romanovska (Daugavpils University, Latvia), Diaspora Festivals as a Way for Development of Cultural Identity in the Regional City: the Case of Daugavpils (Latvia) | Key words: creolization, diaspora, festival, identity, regional city _____ Monika Salzbrunn (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), The Swiss Carnivals of Payerne and Lausanne: Place-making between the mise en scène of Self and the Other(s) | Key words: Brandons, carnival, Othering, performance, place-making, wordplay _____ Tigran Simyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia) and Ilze Kačāne (Daugavpils University, Latvia), Transformations of New Year Celebration in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Era: the Cases of Armenia and Latvia | Key words: Christmas (New Year) tree, Ded Moroz, New Year, post-Soviet, Santa Claus, Soviet, transformation _____ Kiyoshi Umeya (Kobe University, Japan / University of Cape Town, South Africa), Feasts to Send-off the Dead: with Special Reference to the Jopadhola of Eastern Uganda | Key words: agency of the dead, feast, funeral rites, Jopadhola, modernity, Uganda

This is a study of how Donald J. Trump, his populist credentials notwithstanding, borrows without acknowledgment and stubbornly refuses to come to terms with his indebtedness. Taken together with mobility and conviviality, the principle of incompleteness enables us to distinguish between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism, and when it is fuelled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

The concept of ‘performativity’ has risen to prominence throughout the humanities. The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere. As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people’s personal lives. Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics. It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usury and similar performative signs. The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.

The rise of Christianity around the world has been the impetus for much religious and social change. The interconnectivity of religious centers has resulted in theological dialogue and innovation. The subversion of long-held categories of culture, gender, race, spirituality, theology, and politics has naturally occurred along with the transgressing of borders and boundaries. Yet at the same time, there has been occasion for healing through intercultural experiences of forgiveness, peacemaking, and reconciliation. Stimulated by the work and mentorship of Joel Carpenter, who has done much to expand the study of world Christianity less through focusing on his own research and writing, and more through amplifying the voices of others, the international contributors to this volume from all six continents promote a deeper understanding of World Christianity through the exploration of such related themes. Whether discussing primal spirituality in northeast India, white supremacy in South Africa, evangelical women and civic engagement in Kenya, or Calvinism in Mexico, the contributors draw upon ethnographic case studies to more deeply understand interconnectivity, subversion, and healing in World Christianity. Their essays provoke a reorientation of Christian thought within the study of World Christianity, enriching the current discourse and promoting vistas for further interdisciplinary studies.

This volume is a blend of language and literature papers highlighting linguistic functionality and topicality in poetry, novels, translation and education. It sheds light on the fictionalised reality of a strained official linguistic cohabitation in Cameroon as instantiated in present-day colonial legacy claims. It deals with issues of translation as a stylistic exercise whereby the translator has some creativity licence when rendering the source text into the target language, thus embracing Skopos theory’s view of translation as a purposeful activity determined by the target text and audience. This book also looks at an educational conception of translation as opposed to a professional translation curriculum and advocates a comprehensive needs analysis for translator education in the context of translation teaching at the Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters (ASTI) in Cameroon. The chapters also examine teacher and student discourse in the context of English Language teaching in tertiary education in China and pinpoint a dominant teacher’s voice made relevant by a Confucian didactic indexicality, which appears to be a stumbling block to any dialogic classroom discourse, despite a new curriculum promoting communicative language teaching and student-centredness. This book will appeal to academics in the fields of language and literature in general and in Cameroon and China in particular. It will also be a valuable resource for professional translators and those concerned with teaching the subject in academia as it explores a pragmatic conception of translation and envisages it, beyond professionality, as an academic field.