This book introduces Africana Cultures and Policy Studies as an interdisciplinary field of study, rooted in the historical experience of people of African descent and focusing on policy development, anlaysis, and practical application.

African Cultures, Memory and Space is an impeccable volume that powerfully grapples with a gamut of cultural heritage issues, challenges and problems from a vista of inter- and multi-disciplinary approach. The book, which is designed as a foundational text to the study of culture in ever-changing environments, makes an important argument that the dynamism of culture in highly globalised societies such as that of Zimbabwe can be studied from any perspective, but most importantly through careful examination of cultural elements such as memory, oral history and space, among others. While the book makes special reference to Zimbabwe, it profoundly and audaciously dissect and cut across different geographical and cultural spaces through its penetrating interrogation and scrutiny of different issues commonplace in many African contexts and even beyond. The book, written by scholars from different backgrounds and orientations, should appeal to scholars, researchers and students from various disciplines which include but not limited to Cultural Heritage Studies, Policy Studies, Social-Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, Development Studies and African Studies.

African American Consciousness focuses on ideas of culture, race, and class within the interdisciplinary matrix of Africana Studies. Even more important, it uses a methodology that emphasizes interpretation and the necessity of interdisciplinary research and writing in a global society. Worldview, culture, analytic thinking, and historiography can all be used as tools of analysis, and in the process of discovery, use pedagogy, and survey research of Africana history. Advancing the idea of Africana Studies, mixed methodology, and triangulation, the contributors provide alternative approaches toward examining this phenomena, with regard to place, space, and time. The essays in this volume include Reynaldo Anderson, “Black History dot.com”; Greg Carr, “Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and the African World History Project”; Karanja Carroll, “A Genealogical Review of the Worldview Concept and Framework in Africana Studies”; Denise Martin, “Reflections on African Celestial Culture”; Serie McDougal “Teaching Black Males”; Demetrius Pearson, “Cowboys of Color”; Pamela Reed, “Heirs to Disparity”; and Andrew Smallwood, “Malcolm X’s Leadership and Legacy.” The researchers in this volume investigate, explore, and review patterns of functional, normative, and expressive behavior. The past and present of Africana culture is represented, showing how reflexivity can be an adjustable concept to organize, process, and interpret data. Moreover, humanism and social science demonstrate how researchers establish, extract, and identify the limitations and alternative approaches to research of the historic conditions of black Americans.

Tradition and modernity as they relate to African and diasporic cultures do not exist within a vacuum. They reflect the constantly changing relations and factors that define daily life in Africa and beyond. For example, one cannot consider Congolese fabric in the mid-twentieth century without thinking about the immense impact of the Second World War on ideas about French colonialism and trade relations within the French empire. African cultures are immensely significant in the larger histories and microhistories of Africa and the African diaspora because they often reflect the important nuances of race, class, and gender and how these factors intersect with politics and society on local, regional, national, and global levels. This book thus examines the important connections between African cultures and social and political movements in the African diaspora--from Brazil to the United States.

Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has reemerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.

Every political system, either developed or adopted, has an impact on the structure of society and the level of development. This book analyzes the evolution and nature of political institutions and their effect on Africa’s development. The challenges Africa face in developing viable institutions are not limited to the adoption of foreign institutions, but are also rooted in domestic norms that define society itself. Sometimes, these challenges have to do with the incompatibility between foreign and domestic institutions. The fundamental issue then is to understand the African societies, cultures, and other dynamics that have ensured stability in the past and that need to be recognized when adopting contemporary foreign institutions. This comprehensive text examines three key issue areas in Africa: politics, society, and economy. It demonstrates how the lack of consideration for domestic norms and societal realities explain the weaker institutions and lack of development on the African continent. The chapters examine critical issues such as gender, ethnicity and constitution development, legitimacy and the state, the correlation between abundant resources and instability, the dilemmas of political dynasties, international economic regimes and Africa’s economy, and more. Featuring many case studies, including Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Morocco, Togo, DRC, Ethiopia, Rwanda, the book provides some explanation of underdevelopment in Africa, linking the historical and colonial realities that hinder democratic consolidation to contemporary African politics, society and economy.

An analysis of the ties between culture and every aspect of African life, using Africa's past to explain present situations. This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization.The book argues that it is against the backdrop of foreign influences that Africa has defined for itself notions of identity and development. African cultures have been evolving in response to change, and in other ways solidly rooted in a shared past. The book successfully deconstructs the last one hundred and fifty years of cultures that have been disrupted, replaced, and resurrected. The Power of African Cultures challenges many preconceived notions, such as male dominance and female submission, the supposed unity of ethnic groups, and contemporary Western stereotypes of Africans. It also shows the dynamism of African cultures to adapt to foreign imposition: even as colonial rule forced the adoption of foreign institutions and cultures, African cultures appropriated these elements. Traditions were reworked, symbols redefined, and the past situated in contemporary problems in order to accommodate the modern era. Toyin Falola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Exemplary Scholarship in AfricanStudies, and the 2008 Quintessence Award by the Africa Writers Endowment. He holds an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University and he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where heis also the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. His books include Nationalism and African Intellectuals and Violence in Nigeria, both from the University of Rochester Press.

From the 1920s through the 1970s, Howard University was home to America’s most renowned assemblage of black scholars. This book traces some of the personal and professional activities of this community of public intellectuals, demonstrating their scholar-activist nature and the myriad ways they influenced modern African American, African, and Africana policy studies. In Search of the Talented Tenth tells how individuals like Rayford Logan, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, Merze Tate, Charles Wesley, and Dorothy Porter left an indelible imprint on academia and black communities alike through their impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and women’s rights. Zachery Williams explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth by describing the role of public intellectuals from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power movement, in times as trying as the Jim Crow and Cold War eras. Williams first describes how the years 1890 to 1926 laid the foundation for Howard’s emergence as the “capstone of Negro education” during the administration of university president Mordecai Johnson. He offers a wide-ranging discussion of how the African American community of Washington, D.C., contributed to the dynamism and intellectual life of the university, and he delineates the ties that linked many faculty members to one another in ways that energized their intellectual growth and productivity as scholars. He also discusses the interaction of Howard’s intellectual community with those of the West Indies, Africa, and other places, showing the international impact of Howard’s intellectuals and the ways in which black and brown elites outside the United States stimulated the thought and scholarship of the Howard intellectuals. In Search of the Talented Tenth marks the first in-depth study of the intellectual activity of this community of scholars and further attests to the historic role of women faculty in shaping the university. It testifies to the impact of this group as a model against which the twenty-first century’s black public intellectuals can be measured.

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.

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.