Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class

Assessing development thinking from a multidisciplinary perspective, this work argues that Africa is undeveloped not in spite of globalization, but precisely because of globalization’s saintly mission of unbridled liberalization and Euro-American teleology, which has reduced the African governing class to a body of abandonment-neurotics, co-conspirators in the First World’s human and economic genocides. The work suggests subsequently that, provided Africans remain impervious to the anti-Asian agitation which is sweeping the Euro-American world today, they have invaluable lessons in standpoint development to learn from India’s and China’s experiences with liberalism as well as constructive alliances to establish with these emerging transitional nations.

K. Martial Frindéthié is a professor of Francophone studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. An award winning author, his research interests include literature and film and the intersection of literature and political-ideological imagination.

K. Martial Frindéthié
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 204
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2010
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4840-1
eISBN: 978-0-7864-5791-5
Imprint: McFarland

Foreword by George Klay Kieh, Jr.      1

Preface      5

Introduction: We Shall Return to Fanon      7

1. Of Consciousness: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fanon and Others      21

2. The “Old Globalization” and the Invention of Africa      32

3. “Does Anyone Out There Love Me?”      51

4. Françafrique: The Longest Economic and Human Genocide      68

5. Capitalism and Neurosis      93

6. Modernization Theory and the Making of the Abandonment-Neurotic African      108

7. The “Mamadou Syndrome”: Disease of the Native Informant      124

8. Lessons from the East: India’s and China’s Experiences with Liberalism      144

9. Palliative: Toward a New Development Paradigm for Africa      149

Conclusion: Shifting the Center of Development Thinking      174

Chapter Notes      179

Bibliography      189

Index      195