In Africa, the twenty-first century began with new challenges surrounding and regarding philosophical

discourses. Questions of economic and political liberation, the displacement of populations and the process

of urbanization present ongoing challenges, linked to problems such as endemic diseases and famine, the

restructure of the traditional family, gender and the position of women, the transmission of culture from

past to future generations. Changes in labor relations resulting from introduction of financial speculation,

cutting edge technologies, and differential access to digital and older cultural forms have placed real

demands on Africans and Africanists working in philosophy.

This volume explores the ways in which African philosophies express “transitional acts,” those acts by which

thought interacts with history as it is being made and by which it assures its own renewal in proposing

provisional solutions to historical problems. A transitional act combines both the audacity of confrontation

and the novelty of creation, prudence in the face of risks and anticipation in the face of the unexpected.

Influential and emerging thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic consider this dual activity in the realm of

criticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics and

historical poetics.