Forward, Upward, Onward? Narratives of Achievement in African and Afroeuropean Contexts
Synopsis
Achievement-orientation is a powerful global discourse that impacts on all aspects of social and individual life. Whereas the 'achievement principle' was intensely debated in the mid-twentieth-century as part of a framework of rationalisation and global progress in economics and the social sciences, it has attracted research across a wider disciplinary spectrum in the twenty-first century. What remains problematic about these debates is their implicit limitation to Western contexts and perspectives. Achievement-orientation, however, and its manifestation in meritocratic principles permeates and informs cultural narratives across the globe that impact on social and individual lives in multiple ways.
It is present in African societies and in communities across the African diaspora. This collection of short essays seeks to initiate a conversation that can help generate a better understanding of the ways in which achievement and merit are defined, negotiated, represented and embedded, and of the connotations they carry in African contexts, among African social groups and strata, and in communities across the African diaspora, especially in Europe. The collection thus draws attention to the existence of a diversity of concepts of achievement prevalent in these contexts and to embark on explorations into the question of their relations.
Chapters
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Introduction
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Considering the communal aspect of narrating achievement
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Neoliberal meritocracy, racialization and transnationalism
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“Becoming a chief is more important than anything else in life.” Interrogating the notions of success and fulfilment among Mamprusi royals in Northern Ghana.
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“What a shock!”On mediated narratives of achievement in popular Ghanaian death-announcement posters.
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Concepts of achievement among KonkombasRepresentations in their folktales
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Inventing AfricaFrom narratives of achievement to E.U. development discourse
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Mobile telephony and cereal trade in MaliMore than a narrative of achievement
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Myths of productivity in international labour standard trainings by the ILO
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Measuring the global South against the principle of ‘achieving societies’
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‘Against the odds’A reflection on institutional and black doctors’ narratives of achievement at the University of Natal’s Medical School
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‘Universality’ and ‘particularity’ in student residences at Historically White Afrikaans Universities in South Africa. On the challenges of crafting inclusive diversity in organisational transformation
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Alternative narratives of achievement and Democratic Education – a model for a few?
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Blacademics, blacademia and the representation imperative
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The idea of upward mobility within Black French citizenry
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African achievers, structural barriers and ‘The End of AIDS’
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Recognition and the satirization of achievement in African conceptual poetryThe case of Nana Awere Damoah’s "My Book of #GHCoats"
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Against triumphalismMashingaidze Gomo’s Pan-Africanist concept of madness
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Afrofuturism and women’s meritWangechi Mutu’s artwork
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Scheherazade’s achievement(s)Storytelling and agency in Fatima Mernissi’s memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood and Scheherazade Goes West
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“God […] expects perfection.” Norms, forms and performance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "Purple Hibiscus"
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Achieving Blackness and social mobility in Diran Adebayo’s "Some Kind of Black"
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Interrogating the ‘achievement principle’ in Afroeuropean contextsZadie Smith’s "NW" and "Swing Time"
