This chapter addresses the contentious relationship between trauma theory and African fiction, arguing that the latter has always been concerned with historical memory and the attendant traumas of not only colonialism, but also dislocation. The chapter offers an overview of existing scholarship on trauma theory’s origins, discusses emerging debates on its efficacy in dealing with African texts, and, ultimately, argues that African fiction has been engaged in this discourse, even prior to the institutionalization of trauma theory.

Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

This chapter examines how Emmanuel Dongala employs the symbol of China in his fiction to criticize one-party rule in the People’s Republic of the Congo. The symbol is part of a larger invocation of Third Worldism as a key geopolitical and intellectual backdrop for African literature during the twentieth century. The chapter explores the contradictions between postcolonialism and “scientific socialism” via the figure of the “African Mao.” As a symbol, Maoism functions as a paradox in Dongala’s work, inspiring idealism and catalyzing disillusionment; it manifests in characterization (dress, speech, and action) as well as in rhetorical figures (stream of consciousness, intertextuality, and malapropism). The chapter shows how the trope of China crystallizes the perils of Congolese postcolonialism when vernacular convention contests the dogma of revolutionary tautology.

Accounts of African letters have been riven by debates about who owns modernism and revelations about covert CIA sponsorship of African cultural institutions. Rather than relitigating the question of whether modernism in Africa is always (covertly) Euro-modernist, this chapter treats modernism as inherently dialectical. It considers African literary modernism in relation to the modernist aesthetics of Uche Okeke, who illustrated Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the Cold War-era criticism of Es’kia Mphahlele and performed poetry of Atukwei Okai, and to the chimeric category of modernity as figured in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu. At the end of the day, untethering modernism from the chimera of modernity may well enable more persuasive analyses of each. The chapter concludes with Yvonne Vera’s fiction to sketch how modernism emerges as a historical discourse and stylistic repertoire that some African writers continue to make part of practices of freedom.

This chapter compares the processes and outcomes of labor politics in post-uprising Tunisia and Morocco. It explores how institutional legacies from authoritarian rule created distinct opportunities for unions to exert influence over transitional governments and shaped their ability to secure meaningful political and economic reforms. The analysis underscores how historical legacies influence unions’ capacity to engage effectively in political transitions. It concludes by considering how institutional legacies might change.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

This chapter focuses on the diverse manifestations of the feminist movement in Africa and its impact on African literature. It further examines how African women’s writing has contributed to African feminist theorizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Borrowing Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s idea of reading African women’s writing as “theorized fiction” or “fictionalized theory,” the chapter considers, among other issues, how twentieth and twenty-first-century African women’s writing has grappled with questions of gender and how gender is variously conferred and defined; questions of motherhood and how it is configured and contested; and questions of sexuality and the female body. The chapter also pays close attention to the epistemic shifts and various decolonial trajectories that obtain in African feminist thinking and how these are enunciated in African literature.

This chapter surveys the history of Pan-Africanism as an aesthetic current that paralleled more formalized political solidarity. The chapter asserts that differences across languages and periods complicate Pan-Africanism’s intellectual history. With particular attention to the diversity of origins, it shows how pre-independence African ties with the diaspora fed into continental initiatives along linguistic lines. While the anglophone tradition emerged in close alignment with African American writers, particularly Langston Hughes, the shared roots in negritude between francophone African and Caribbean writers were productive and provocative, lusophone alignments emerged through continent-based anthologies, and arabophone literatures were interpreted through Pan-Arab as well as Pan-African formations. Given the transnational dimension, African languages have figured less prominently in Pan-African literature. In more recent times, feminism, decolonial imperatives, and changes in publishing and educational institutions have been influential. The tensions between Pan-Africanism and other intellectual traditions remain fertile ground for future scholarship.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.