Globalization, 'African Renaissance' and Contested Identities

Using the concept of (multiple) identities as constructed by (shifting, porous) boundaries, the paper explores how these philosophical notions play themselves out in Africa under condition of globalization. It begins with the idea of an African Renaissance, given special currency in South Africa and more widely by our current President, Thabo Mbeki. It is his sense of Africanness that I probe, and its relation to identity under globalizing conditions. Second, I read globalization itself as a way of orienting the notion of identity within a broader field of terms—social, political and economic. Third, I treat what seems either to be truncated or seen as derivative forces of money (or economy) and power (or politics) in some theories, namely, culture—more precisely, religion, the one thing that seems most derivative to creatures of the Enlightenment. I seek to redraw boundaries, to read globalization from another place, to link it to the place of Europe and to relocate it in an African worldview, which is not an African worldview alone, and thus to decentre it.