Responding to the invitation ‘to re-member severed but shareable things’, these lovers of truth, freedom, and dignity celebrate the searing intellect, generosity, wit, and compassion of the person and the scholar Ato Sekyi-Otu. In the crucial spaces he opened to generate alternatives to brutally Eurocentric Marxism and a politically hopeless post-structuralism, racial separatism and imperialist universalism, the wonderfully challenging essays of this collection together affirm that if the universal can only speak in particular tongues, it is our job to discern and amplify what is being uttered. Combined with Sekyi-Otu’s autobiographical reflections of learning to be Black in the United States and insistence that Afropessimism turns the perverse ontology of the antiblack world into a Black ontology, this is a precious contribution. Not to be missed! — Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement and co-editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Critically engaging Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of partisan universalism, this timely volume of essays speaks directly to the onto-metaphysical issues that will give Africana thought the new foundations that will enable it to move beyond the linguistic turn, brush aside the ashes of Afro-pessimism, engage Badiou’s new mathematical universalism, and to launch new projects of liberation on decolonized grounds of greater epistemic independence. A must read for all concerned with the future of Africana theory and praxis. — Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason.

Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. It is no exaggeration to affirm that he is one of the two most innovative contemporary dialectical thinkers, the other being Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba. The texts compiled in this volume celebrate and engage with the work of Sekyi-Otu and were all delivered at a conference in his honour held at York University in October 2019. They bear eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and also to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice. Deeply anchored in African cultures and modes of life, Sekyi-Otu has shown how ideas of human universality are ingrained in African popular sayings and proverbs and are regularly reflected in artistic creations. The various texts collected here provide not only a glimpse of the extraordinary depth of his thinking and breadth of his knowledge, but also of his genuine commitment to a better world for all of us. — Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa