A call for a special issue: Rethinking the Philosopher-King. The issue will be guest edited by Professor Akin Adesokan, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Deadline for Abstract: March 15, 2011
Deadline for Paper: June 30, 2011
Submit your paper directly to Prof. Adesokan at adesokan at indiana.edu.
Rethinking the Philosopher-King
One of the more spectacular features of anti-colonial nationalism was the figure of the political leader as a thinker, an intellectual, and most particularly a “Big Man.” Politicians like Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Ahmed Sekou Touré were not content to be leaders of independence political movements or parties. In addition, and often collusively with their political trajectories, they wrote politico-philosophical treatises, “autobiographies,” “lives,” and “odysseys,” implicitly theorizing homologies of the political self and the national destiny. They displayed their unforgettable honorifics, too: “Osagyefo,” “Awo,” “Zik of Africa,” et cetera, et cetera.