Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert

by Kamau Rashid

Overview

Finding Our Way Through the Desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview offers a critical examination of the ideas and work of Carruthers, a key architect of the African-centered paradigm and a major contributor to its application to the study of Nile Valley culture and civilization. Herein, Kamau Rashid explicates some of Carruthers’s principal contributions, the theoretical and practical implications of his work, and how Carruthers’s work is situated in the stream of Black intellectual genealogy. Essential to this book are Carruthers’s concerns about the vital importance of Black intellectuals in the illumination of new visions of future possibility for African people. The centrality of African history and culture as resources in the transformation of consciousness and ultimately the revitalization of an African worldview were key elements in Carruthers’s conceptualization of two interrelated imperatives—the re-Africanization of Black consciousness and the transformation of reality. Composed of three parts, this book discusses various themes including Black education, disciplinary knowledge and knowledge construction, indigenous African cosmologies, African deep thought, institutional formation, revolutionary struggle, history and historiography to explore the implications of Carruthers’s thinking to the ongoing malaise of African people globally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793608505
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/05/2024
Series:	Critical Africana Studies
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Kamau Rashid is professor and founding director of the Leadership, Equity, & Inquiry doctoral program at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Intellectual Project of Jacob H. Carruthers

Part I: Mis-education, Deeducation, and African-centered Education

Chapter 1: Slavery of the Mind: Carter G. Woodson and Jacob H. Carruthers—Intergenerational Discourse on African Education and Social Change

Chapter 2: Jacob H. Carruthers and the African-Centered Discourse on Knowledge, Worldview, and Power

Chapter 3: Thoughts on Returning Home and Healing the Casualties of Intellectual War

Part II: Knowledge Production and African Liberation

Chapter 4: Jacob H. Carruthers, Disciplinarity, and the Limitations of the European-modes of Knowledge Construction

Chapter 5: Drawing from the Deep Well: Reflections on African-centered Social Inquiry

Chapter 6: Ideation and Freedom: Continued Meditations on African-centered Social Inquiry

Chapter 7: Kheper and Maat: Consubstantiality in Kemetic Thought

Part III: Re-Africanization and Transformation

Chapter 8: A Deep Commitment to the Higher Ideals of Life: Reflections on African Spirituality

Chapter 9: Building for Eternity: Institution Building and African Liberation

Chapter 10: The Sebayet of the Haitian Revolution: Lessons from Carruthers’s Irritated Genie

Conclusion: Finding Our Way Through the Desert: Pan-African Historiography and Futurity

References

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

This book brings critical attention to the broad contours of the intellectual project of Jacob H. Carruthers, Jr. In marshalling a synthesis of the themes embedded in his works, Kamau Rashid has provided us with a guide to understanding how Carruthers understood the relationship between African-centered knowledge production and liberation. The clarity of this divine conversation has never been more urgent.

Joshua Myers

A proverb in the Akan tradition states Apɔnkyerɛne wu a, na yɛhunu ne tenten ‘It is when the frog dies that we see its length.’ Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert by Kamau Rashid serves as the blueprint and template for what an intellectual biography can and should be. This meticulous treatise on the voluminous contributions of Baba Jedi Shemsu Jehuty provides both the reader familiar with his work as well as any who may only be introduced to him by means of this book, with much to contemplate. Rashid has done well in ensuring that Baba Jedi continues to speak to current and future generations in profound ways that contribute to the restoration of our worldview.

Ọbádélé Kambon

There are only a handful of scholars that could even venture to write a book on Jacob Carruthers, one of the most important African centered thinkers of the 20th century, because the task calls for much more than a surface descriptive treatment and the scholar has to have thorough familiarity with a wide range of texts, especially Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian). Kamau Rashid is the perfect scholar for this task and this book is a masterpiece that narratively situates and explains the depth and meaning of Carruthers' life and work. Written with empathy and deep insight, Rashid allows Carruthers to speak for himself throughout while deftly providing the reader with all of the essential historical, intellectual, cultural, and political context. This book is needed and Rashid has delivered, to both a popular audience and specialists, a work that will be read and widely used for many years to come.

Mario Beatty