This chapter establishes the theoretical foundations of the book by reviewing three major explanatory frameworks for labor protest: structural-economic, organizational, and institutional. Using quantitative data, it compares the structural features of Tunisia’s and Morocco’s economies and the organizational profiles of their labor unions. After finding existing explanations wanting, the chapter advances a integrative historical institutional perspective, underscoring the importance of labor incorporation policies, political coalitions, and internal union dynamics in shaping labor’s preferences and capacity for militancy. It argues that authoritarian strategies intended to depoliticize labor can paradoxically empower unions, equipping them with the resources and organizational capacity needed to challenge the state.

Developments in magical realist critical discourse have benefited the study of African literature in several ways. The notion that there is no single point of origin for magical realism refocuses critical attention on African oral traditions, where the supernatural has long mingled with realist elements. And clarity over the nature and purposes of magical realism allows insight into how it simultaneously enables recuperation and critique. This essay considers the history of attempts to theorize magical realism in Africa, before turning to two often-neglected early exemplars of the mode, Thomas Mofolo and Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa’s countryman, Amos Tutuola, developed the African mode of magical realism in flamboyant ways, as did Ben Okri, and, later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In interpreting the work of Ngũgĩ the discussion circles back to global interlocutors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie because, like them, Ngũgĩ self-consciously deploys magical realism to facilitate satire and powerful political critique.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

Premised on the assumption that Afropolitan immobilities are as central to Afropolitanism as the forms of liquid flows and circulations that scholarship on Afropolitanism tends to focalize, this chapter uses modes of spatial and digital immobility in the production of Afropolitan subjectivities to read mainly anglophone Afropolitan literatures. Drawing on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, with occasional references to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Teju Cole’s Open City, the essay lingers on how the mobilities of Afropolitan cultural productions are intimately connected to symbolic and concrete geographies of stasis and technologies of nonmovement. Although Afropolitanism is often discussed as exhibiting affinities with the earlier Pan-Africanism, its ontological poetics similarly connects to digital cosmopolitanism, the condition of digital connectivity that centers the multiple roots and routes of global subjects whose cosmopolitanism is often entangled with forms of immobility and the quotidian use of digital social networks.

In order to make sense of literary texts, writers and readers require some common understanding of what happened and what matters in history, of what has already been written, and of where people and things are located in relation to other people and things. The academic study of African literature, too, relies on common notions of Africa, its past and its location in the world. We are calling these shared understandings, integral to imagining a work in the first place and necessary for it to be understood by those who receive it, the archive of African literature. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves in a tradition and center themselves in the world. Mental maps define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions to which producers of texts must respond: where stories are set, who writers write for, how texts have meaning. Writers need to imagine themselves contributing to a body of literature; readers need to understand the field in which texts are produced.

This chapter offers a reading of a range of anglophone East African novels from Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Comoros, and Madagascar to highlight the long history of multifaceted interactions between African and Arab communities in the region due to trade, migration, intermarriage, and the assimilation of cultural and religious elements into Swahili culture. The narratives mark conditions of possibility for capacious diversity, hospitality, and accommodation, while simultaneously attending to prevalent racisms and forms of oppression: notably the slave trade, labor indenture, and the cruelty against women and children in patriarchal environments. Traces of the diffusion of Arab peoples, the spread of Islam and associated ways of life, the cross-fertilization of material culture, and the circulation of ideas and things on the Swahili littoral are demonstrated to be narrativized as diverse and varying. The chapter concludes that the fiction points to the shifting, contingent meanings of the African–Arab encounter at different points in time and in different places along this vast coastline.

This chapter examines how francophone and anglophone fiction restages and archives women’s forms of resistance against colonial ideologies and practices. The Women’s War of 1929 in Igboland, the 1933 Togolese market women uprisings against taxation, the 1934 beer boycott in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1947 women’s demonstrations against taxation in Yorubaland, the 1949 women’s march in Côte d’Ivoire, the 1958 women’s mass protests in the Cameroon Grassfields, the 1959 beer hall riots and boycott in South Africa, and the 1971 Kono Women’s rebellion in eastern Sierra Leone were mostly sidelined in the then prevalent masculinist historiography, both colonial and local. Studying two novels, Echewa’s 1994 historical fictionalization of the 1929’s war, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992), and Amondji’s restaging of the Ivorian women’s 1948 march in Sidjè ou la marche des femmes sur la prison de Grand-Bassam (2007), highlights women’s active participation in these aspirations for sociopolitical sovereignty. As part of their contestation strategies, the women in both events draw on socially sanctioned female forms of conflict management, genital shaming and cleansing. Departing from the emotionally deprived (post)colonial accounts and closely reading these fictional archives, we can discern the emotional landscape of thousands of social-political actors who provide moments of both empowerment and caution for present and future-oriented struggles for self-determination.