Religious dialogue, trade, slave mobility, knowledge circulation, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange, colonization, resistance, creolization: Africans have been connected to the rest of the world in every possible way.
At a time when simplistic representations of Africa’s role in international relations are being perpetuated, Sonia Le Gouriellec’s book provides a review of the main studies on the place of the continent in the global arena from past to present.
In her memoir, the renowned French researcher Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch looks back on her Jewish childhood, her first experience of Africa in the 1960s, the neo-colonialist stance of some academics, and her intellectual and political career, in which anti-racism has played a pivotal role.
Was nation-building in Africa destined to fail? The question is particularly important for one of the most fragile states in the world—Sudan. Set in a period that straddles the late colonial and early independence era, Alden Young’s book addresses the auspices of postcolonial nation-building.
Abducted in Africa, detained in Cuba, the slaves aboard the Amistad ship organised a rebellion in 1839, before reaching the United States where they were subsequently imprisoned. The survivors were ultimately taken back to Sierra Leone, following a long publicity tour set up to pay for their homeward journey.
The question of the origin of AIDS has given rise to a wealth of studies. Moving away from conspiracy theories or culturalist readings, Guillaume Lachenal shows that the key issue is retracing the colonial, epidemiological, and sexual context that fostered the propagation of the virus rather than identifying a specific cause.
Why do people migrate? How can they live in several worlds and many nations at once? Tracing the history of the Lebanese migration to West Africa, Andrew Arsan offers a brilliant reappraisal of diaspora, nation and empire in the first half of the twentieth century.
Denouncing the neglect of the independence era by African historians, Frederick Cooper asserts that a continent of nation-states was not the inevitable outcome of decolonization.
When the social mobility of black citizens disturbs the dominant racial and spatial order, the members of the minority are sometimes abruptly put back to their place. An article by Elijah Anderson shows how the black ghetto, in its social and symbolic dimensions, contributes to the exclusion of African-Americans. What would be the American ghetto’s French equivalent?
What do we really know about economic growth, wealth, the population or the structure of the economy in Africa? Building a history of how economic statistics about Africa are produced and consumed helps Jerven design a new approach to developing a periodization of the African state.
Ghislaine Lydon’s study of the Sahara uncovers the dynamic commercial and trade networks that have always dominated the desert. It offers vivid portraits of the evolution of social and economic institutions, which should put to rest once and for all any ideas that the pre-colonial societies of Africa, north, within or south of the Sahara have ever been stagnant.
The sociologist Michel Kokoreff takes a fresh look at the controversy aroused by Hugues Lagrange’s book Le déni des cultures. He urges us not to neglect the substance of the debate and analyzes the book’s theses in detail before subjecting them to criticism.
How did it come about that by 7 April 1994 a political faction had decided on and initiated the Tutsi genocide? André Guichaoua’s book investigates the Rwandan state’s genocide strategy, which was carried out by an extremist government after it had eliminated the legitimate authorities.
Are fears of new forms of colonization of Africa by China justified? In a book based on solid investigation and evidence, Deborah Brautigam clears prevailing misconceptions and uncovers the unprecedented realities of China’s presence in the African continent.
