RE-VISIONING CULTURAL STUDIES FOR DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA: THE INTERPLAY OF LITERATURE, CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The development of human society can be conceived in two ways: at the individual level, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility and material well-being; at the social level, it implies an increasing capacity to regulate both internal and external relationships. Culture, similarly, is a twofold process: an ‘inner’ process specialised to its presumed agencies in ‘intellectual life’ and ‘the arts’ and a general process specialised to its presumed configuration in ‘whole ways of life’. All of these conceptions are evidently human-centred, i.e. man (and his society) assumes the meeting locus of culture and development. Thus, on the one hand, this study delineates ‘culture,’ and indeed ‘cultural studies,’ and ‘development’ in very broad terms, foregrounding their core essences that provide the means for transcending conventional approaches and understanding of these terms. This semantic extensiveness of the concept of cultural studies, on the other hand, has been re-tooled to re-echo the social functionality of cultural studies in Africa as a great and powerful mechanism for tackling headlong Africa’s current developmental challenges in the twenty-first century. The human-centredness is projected as the coalescing-agency which justifies cultural studies as an integral component of development in human society. Since cultural studies would then entail both artistic creativity and criticism, in this case, in the African context, it is being re-visioned in this study as a panacea for Africa’s contemporary developmental challenges; cultural studies being a pursuit of our total perfection and imperfection by means of stark exposure to all the matters which most concern us as a distinct people.