The first survey of the Pan-African movement this century, this book provides a history of the individuals and organisations that have sought the unity of all those of African origin as the basis for advancement and liberation. Initially an idea and movement that took root among the African Diaspora, in more recent times Pan-Africanism has been embodied in the African Union, the organisation of African states which includes the entire African Diaspora as its 'sixth region'. Hakim Adi covers many of the key political figures of the 20th century, including Du Bois, Garvey, Malcolm X, Nkrumah and Gaddafi, as well as Pan-African culture expression from Négritude to the wearing of the Afro hair style and the music of Bob Marley.
Pan-Africanism in Ghana is an interdisciplinary exploration of the various ways Pan-African politics have been expressed by politicians in the Republic of Ghana from the colonial era to the present. By focusing on transnational politics in the context of a single nation over time, this study gives critical insight into the complex global, national, and local pressures that shaped Pan-African politics and the Republic of Ghana simultaneously. While there has been a great deal of work on Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana's First Republic, this book's major contribution is to trace Pan-African ideas in Ghanaian politics past the Nkrumah era, through the years of weak civilian governments and military rule, to the present. This approach explains how and why Pan-Africanism has shifted, inresponse to major global geopolitical changes and the objectives of Ghanaian political elites, from an anti-imperial African socialist oriented ideology to one supporting neoliberal nation-building. By viewing Ghanaian history through the lenses of economics, cultural anthropology, and political economy, this study reveals the extremely malleable nature of Pan-African ideas and the ingenuity of politicians looking to utilize them for a variety of political projects. In short, Ghana's conception as a springboard for a greater African union left a legacy subsequent civilian and military leaders of various ideological shades had to grapple with. The ways they rejected, embraced, or sought to subvert the nation's internationalist past helps us understand the mechanics of decolonization/nation-building in a globalizing world. Pan-Africanism in Ghana contributes to the historiography of Ghana by focusing on often overlooked figures and placing the development of the West African nation in a wider global context, while also presenting new multi-faceted arguments to debates about the history of Pan-Africanism. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "This book is very informative as it offers the much needed help for comprehending the Pan African movement. Thus, it can serve as an excellent reference for general readers and students of Pan-Africanism alike, who want to learn how the concept can be used to shed light on and respond to the forces of globalization and address the current predicaments of the people of Africa."--Zerihun Berhane Weldegebriel, Addis Ababa University, African Studies Quarterly
When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.
W. E. B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent African American intellectual of the twentieth century. As a pioneering historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, and as a novelist and autobiographer, he made the problem of race central to an understanding of the United States within both national and transnational contexts; his masterwork The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is today among the most widely read and most often quoted works of American literature. This Companion presents ten specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars which explore key aspects of Du Bois's work. The book offers students a critical introduction to Du Bois, as well as opening new pathways into the further study of his remarkable career. It will be of interest to all those working in African American studies, American literature, and American studies generally.
With forty accessible essays on the key intellectual contributions to Pan-Africanism, this volume offers readers a fascinating insight into the intellectual thinking and contributions to Pan-Africanism. The book explores the history of Pan-Africanism and quest for reparations, early pioneers of Pan-Africanism as well as key activists and politicians, and Pan-African philosophy and literati. Diverse and key figures of Pan-Africanism from Africa, the Caribbean, and America are covered by these chapters, including: Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Arthur Lewis, Maya Angelou, C.L.R. James, Ruth First, Ali Mazrui, Wangari Maathai, Thabo Mbeki, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Chimamanda Adichie. While acknowledging the contributions of these figures to Pan-Africanism, these essays are not just celebratory, offering valuable criticism in areas where their subjects may have fallen short of their ideals.
There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recent political waves that have swept across North Africa and their implications to the study of twenty-first century Pan-African solidarity on the African continent. The ways in which African institutions are attracting and mobilizing returnees and Pan-Africanists with incentives as dual-citizenship for diasporans to support reforms in Africa offers a new alternative approach for exploring Pan-African ideology in the twenty-first century. Returnees are also using these incentives to gain economic and cultural advantage. The book will appeal to policy makers, government institutions, research libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from many different disciplines.
The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism provides an international, intersectional, and interdisciplinary overview of, and approach to, Pan-Africanism, making an invaluable contribution to the ongoing evolution of Pan-Africanism and demonstrating its continued significance in the 21st century. The handbook features expert introductions to, and critical explorations of, the most important historic and current subjects, theories, and controversies of Pan-Africanism and the evolution of black internationalism. Pan-Africanism is explored and critically engaged from different disciplinary points of view, emphasizing the multiplicity of perspectives and foregrounding an intersectional approach. The contributors provide erudite discussions of black internationalism, black feminism, African feminism, and queer Pan-Africanism alongside surveys of black nationalism, black consciousness, and Caribbean Pan-Africanism. Chapters on neo-colonialism, decolonization, and Africanization give way to chapters on African social movements, the African Union, and the African Renaissance. Pan-African aesthetics are probed via literature and music, illustrating the black internationalist impulse in myriad continental and diasporan artists’ work. Including 36 chapters by acclaimed established and emerging scholars, the handbook is organized into seven parts, each centered around a comprehensive theme: Intellectual origins, historical evolution, and radical politics of Pan-Africanism Pan-Africanist theories Pan-Africanism in the African diaspora Pan-Africanism in Africa Literary Pan-Africanism Musical Pan-Africanism The contemporary and continued relevance of Pan-Africanism in the 21st century The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism is an indispensable source for scholars and students with research interests in continental and diasporan African history, sociology, politics, economics, and aesthetics. It will also be a very valuable resource for those working in interdisciplinary fields, such as African studies, African American studies, Caribbean studies, decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, women and gender studies, and queer studies.
A Guyanese by birth and a Kenyan by citizenship, Ras Makonnen would still regard these two aspects of his life as accidents of history—his roots and destiny are in the continent of Africa. For the last half of the twentieth century, he has striven, along with the other major architects of pan-Africanism, to reconcile the forces that still divide the continent. This volume is a further contribution to that struggle. Makonnen’s analysis of the pan-African movement starts in the former British Guiana (Guyana) in the early twenties, warms up to the North American scene where, as a young man, he got increasingly more aware of the African and diasporic African person’s position in world history. He then describes his days in London and Manchester from the mid-thirties to the fifties; Accra (Ghana) until the fall of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 and thereafter Nairobi (Kenya), where he worked and made his transition. Although the narrative is peppered with the most delightful character sketches of early African and other Black leaders, the author’s main concern is to interpret the quality of life amongst Black people at home and abroad. He does so by employing a wide historical perspective and by infusing into his study of particular pan-African actors his knowledge of the intellectual and political climate at large. He produces in the process a vivid participator’s commentary on whole areas that have been quite neglected in conventional studies of pan-Africanism. Black intergroup relations in North America and the African diaspora in the Caribbean; race relations in Britain; Black intellectuals and the white Left; Black expatriates and African socialism—these are just a few of the themes examined against a background of individual famous personalities as well as others not documented before. With an autobiographical thread that runs throughout, Makonnnen’s narrative is a uniquely diversified pan-African portrait.
Contains papers from the 7th Pan African Congress held in Kampala, Uganda, in April 1994, the first of three volumes planned as output of the congress. Contributors offer both analysis and practical solutions on how Africa can reclaim its history and confront the threat of recolonization in the form of IMF/World Bank policies and domination of African civil society by northern NGOs, dealing with issues such as the African woman, creating an African common market, and science and technology as a solution to underdevelopment. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
For about one hundred years, Pan-Africanism—as a social, cultural, economic, political, and philosophical idea—thrived. Towards the tail-end of the twentieth century, however, it waned. But in more recent times, there has been noticeable resurgence. And as we approach the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are indications of significant transformations vis-à-vis the role and place of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Africanists. Consequently, this book offers a new, further, and better understanding of Pan-Africanism—not just from the traditional, African, and African American points of view, but also from a global perspective. It does so by offering an analysis of its early years in terms of the personalities, ideas, and conferences that shaped it; it also examines many of the factors that brought about its decline—and its eventual rebirth. Contributing to this seminal work are scholars of different but complementary styles and intellect, who deviate from the more traditional or obvious approaches. For instance, one of the chapters explores Pan-Africanism from the geographic perspective, while another examines the role and place of women in the Pan-African movement. There are also voices that advance the conversation from the regional and continental viewpoint—hence chapters that investigate the status of Pan-Africanism in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and Islam and Pan-Africanism in the modern world. Ethnonationalism and xenophobia are also part of the treatise because, increasingly, these injurious phenomena are reemerging in Africa’s landscape and consciousness. In an increasingly interdependent and interrelated world, this book also suggests that Pan-Africanism will undergo a metamorphosis: problems and challenges will be seen and tackled from the globalization and global common perspective. Pan-Africanism in Modern Times goes beyond the historicity of Pan-Africanism and examines the challenges, concerns, and constraints it faces; and also examines it from an inclusive perspective to have a broader understanding of this phenomenon and its future trajectory.
