Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai

by Besi Brillian Muhonja

Overview

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades. In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896803268
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Series:	Ohio RIS Africa Series
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Besi Brillian Muhonja is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and African, African American, and diaspora studies in the Department of English at James Madison University.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xii

1 Birthing Radical Selves: The Making of a Scholar-Activist 1

2 Replenishing the Earth: Maathai's Holistic Environmentalism 21

3 Eco-agency and Unbowed Personhood: A Decolonial Imagining of Equity 42

4 Theorizing and Activating Utu Citizenships 65

5 Just Globalization: Utu and Development as Social Justice 90

6 Scholar-Activist Legacy 113

Appendix 1 Awards and Honors 129

Appendix 2 Saving Karura 133

Notes 137

References 141

Index 149

Editorial Reviews

In this loving, well-researched, and beautifully written book, Besi Brillian Muhonja brings out the other side of the distinguished environmentalist and Nobel laureate, Wangari Muta Maathai—that of thinker and activist scholar. By focusing on the philosophical and theoretical legacies of Maathai’s work, the book takes us beyond the controversies and headlines to provide a powerful analysis of the philosophical thinking that drove her activism. Radical Utu is a model of how to prioritize African thinkers in the production of global knowledge.”—Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University


“This is a brilliant articulation of Nobel laureate Wangari Muta Maathai’s philosophy of holistic environmentalism that is unapologetically rooted in radical utu, a philosophy of personhood that drives the rebalancing of power in societies. Muhonja applies the epistemological strategy of critical decolonial thinking to render visible the superb powerful thinker that is Wangari Maathai, who conceptually moved our comprehension of the self to a transgendered place where ecology revivifies humanity only if we, in turn, tend to its healing transformational powers.”—Nkiru Nzegwu, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Binghamton University

From the Publisher