Alena Rettová
Principal Investigator, Philosophy and Genre Project
Alena Rettová leads the Professorship of African and Afrophone Philosophies at the University of Bayreuth. With degrees in Philosophy, German Studies and African Studies and a PhD from Charles University in Prague, she explores how philosophical thought moves through African languages, literatures, and musical traditions. Her work spans Swahili, Shona, Ndebele, Lingala, Bambara, and Yorùbá texts, tracing how language and form shape ideas. She is the author of Afrophone Philosophies: Reality and Challenge (2007) and a monograph on Congolese poet Sando Marteau (2013). After fourteen years at SOAS London, she returned to Bayreuth in 2020 to launch the Philosophy and Genre project, focusing on the novel in African languages and Sufi poetry.
≣ Publications
≣ Peer-Reviewed Articles
≣ Moyo wangu, nini huzundukani?: Self and Attention in Sayyid Abdallah bin Ali bin Nasir’s Al-Inkishafi
Author(s): Alena Rettová
Published in: Journal of World Philosophies, Vol. 5 (2), 2020, pp. 28–42
Publisher: Indiana University Press
DOI: —
→ https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/view/4044
Abstract: Reading the Swahili zuhdiyya poem Al-Inkishafi, Rettová explores how ascetic Sufi poetics stage introspection, agency and the ethical role of attention. Amid political-economic decline, the poem interrogates selfhood’s stability, showing attention as a cognitive and moral practice that orients the self toward truth and salvation.
≣ Post-Genocide, Post-Apartheid: The Shifting Landscapes of African Philosophy, 1994–2019
Author(s): Alena Rettová
Published in: Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, 9 (1), 2021, pp. 11–58
Publisher: University of Hradec Králové
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v9i1.360
→ https://journals.uhk.cz/modernafrica/article/view/212
Abstract: Surveys African philosophy since 1994 through a tension between optimistic norm-creating vocabularies and a critical realism shaped by traumatic histories. Maps key currents—Ubuntu, Calabar School, Afrikology, Ateliers de la pensée, Francophone histories, Lusophone political thought—to show evolving concepts, publics and agendas in post-apartheid and post-genocide contexts.
≣ Generic Fracturing in Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth
Author(s): Alena Rettová
Published in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989420984826
→ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989420984826
Abstract: Identifies “generic fracturing,” a narrative strategy inserting heterogeneous genres—poetry, praise-songs, proverbs—into prose fiction. Focusing on Acoli mwoc in White Teeth, Rettová shows how embedded forms unsettle the European novel’s inherited aesthetics, signaling alternative ontologies and epistemologies within African literary modernity.
≣ Book Chapters
≣ Philosophy and Genre: African Philosophy in Texts
Author(s): Alena Rettová
Published in: In Africa in a Multilateral World: Afropolitan Dilemmas, pp. 203–228, 2022
Publisher: Routledge
DOI: —
Abstract: Argues that overlooking “genre” has skewed debates about African philosophy. Through African-language texts, Rettová shows how form—poetry, narrative, proverb, orature—shapes argument, authority and reception, urging genre-attentive readings to recover philosophical richness across linguistic traditions and rethink what counts as philosophy.