Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

Product Description


African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation.


This volume collects an array of essays that reflect on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. The volume considers archive in a Derridean sense, as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of the African anticolonial archive is one that involves a contemporary process of curating. The essays in this volume, as well as the volume itself, enact different ways of curating material from this period.


The project reflects an approach to documents, arguments, and materials that can be considered “international relations” and “world politics,” but in ways that that intentionally leaves them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. While we examine many of the same questions that have been asked within area studies, African studies, and International Relations, we do so through an alternative archive. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that Africa is solely the domain of policy makers and area studies, and African peoples as the objects of data


Review


This is an excellent anthology! It is the fruit of a timely and highly creative act of curation. El-Malik and Kamola bring together a wonderfully heterodox group of scholars to explore the intellectual backbone of African anticolonial struggles. Neither a nostalgic undertaking nor one in search of a bounded territorial authenticity, it offers readers a fresh encounter with a vibrant horizon of possibilities developed in the face of fierce opposition. Not limited to intervening in an academic field or the historical study of failed ideas, together the contributors explore the meaning of an African anticolonial archive as a global inheritance, one that illuminates core aspects of the human condition, fundamental questions of politics, and what counts as knowledge when seeking to forge a world that is no longer colonized. -- Jane Anna Gordon, author of
Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement andCreolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through FanonAcademic literature has not taken the intellectual work of African anti-colonial thinkers seriously. Forgotten is the clarity of Amilcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara as well as the movements they led. This volume is part of a long task of recovery, to excavate the ferocious intelligence of the African anti-colonial world and bring it into our times. -- Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut


About the Author


Dr. Shiera Sharafuddin el-Malik is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at DePaul University

Isaac Kamola is an Assistant Professor in Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College