Abstract
The “stranger” and strangeness have become key notions of our negotiated encounters of those considered foreign to our community, ways of life, and our lived world. Noting that the phenomenon has been conceptually examined beginning with the work of Georg Simmel “Der Fremde” (“The Stranger”), the chapter employs the early conceptual analyses of the stranger to engage an understanding of the stranger in African spaces. This is done as some preparation for examining the phenomenon of the stranger within the context of othering and the “other.” To do this, the stranger is further presented as different by employing the framework of the epistemology of difference. And so, the thrust of the chapter is the analysis of stranger in Africa as an instance of the “other,” construed through the process of othering, typified in African by the right of belongingness, which differentiates the identities of the host and that of the stranger.
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Ikhane, P.A. (2019). The Stranger, Othering, and the Epistemology of Difference in African Space. In: Imafidon, E. (eds) Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04941-6_30-1
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