Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought

Towards an Alluvial Poetics of Worlding

Michael Stern

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765139646
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Michael Stern sets Nietzsche in conversation with Africana artists and philosophers to explore the role of aesthetics in decolonial worldmaking.

Nietzsche, a theorist of power, morality, and aesthetics supplies a description of a world making that also destroys. His notion of the will to power explains how particular and local interpretations spread and dominate. Stern situates Nietzsche's thought alongside those of Africana artists and thinkers who, confronted with the effects of the slave trade and colonial violence, speak to new theoretical paradigms addressing erasure and displacement and its relationship to form making.

Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought opens with Nietzsche's work on the human imagination and its institutionalized restrictions, written around when the Congress of Berlin divided Africa without the presence of Africans. The book ends with the Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui's understanding of temporality, form, and naming as he creates a slave memorial in a Danish setting.

Eschewing notions of hierarchal authority and keeping in mind how epistemological racism has delimited our philosophical possibilities, Michael Stern employs thought from each lineage to open the space for what Frantz Fanon calls a human with a new sense for rhythm. What emerges is a different sense for history, morality, culture, and political life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The Poetics of Worlding: Forms and Rhythms
• I Introduction: Imagine a World
• II Sils Maria, Switzerland, 1885: Consider the Midge
• III The Lies of the Poet and the Birth of Philosophical Truth
• Part Two: Rhythm, Repetition, Morality: Der Mensch Classifies Muntu
• IV Expansion Both Worlds and Unworlds
• V The Other Side of the Horizon: Provincializing Nietzsche and Négritude
• VI Morality and Rhythm: Senghor Asks Zarathustra to Dance
• VII We Knowers Do Not Know Ourselves
• VIII Accra, Ghana, 1958: Limbs Taut as Springs then Fluid as Water
• Part Three: The Experience of an Unworlded World
• IX Introduction: The Poetics of Unworlding
• X The Ocean Sings a Chorus of Rivers: Polyphonic Discourse
• XI A Mirror and Its Madness: Palos de la Frontera and Guanahani, August to Early October 1492
• XII Berlin, Germany, November 1884 to February 1885: Africa’s Doubled Landscape
• XIII On the Way from Limuru, Kenya to Makere, Uganda, June 1959
• XIV Diaspora and the Transparent Body: Achille, Afolabe, and the Leaf
• XV A Brief Comment on Power and Forms
• Part Four: Sifting through the Alluvium, Moving Towards a Poetics of Reworlding
• XVI Movement: Old Wood
• XVII Movement: Driftwood Found on Distant Shores, Fire from the Forge
• XVIII Movement: Naming the Unnamed, Writing in the Watery Channels of the Abyss
• XIX Coda: A Name as Fluid as Water
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright