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.

In 1995, Thabo Mbeki’s keynote address at a G7 meeting, lauded by Tim Berners-Lee, underscored the Web’s potential to revolutionize global social and political landscapes, particularly emphasizing its significance for Africa. This chapter looks at the impact of digital technology on African literature. Using Chimamanda Adichie, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Brittle Paper as anchor points, it examines how digital technology and culture are reconstituting literary audiences, making space for the emergence of new knowledge domains and transforming the production infrastructures. It concludes that digital culture is the epistemic context in which twenty-first-century African literature exhibits some of its most defining characteristics.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which African literatures have interacted with and related to trends and turns in ecocriticism specifically and the environmental humanities more broadly. Reading a long history of environmental writing from the continent, the chapter aims to complicate how ecological thinking in African literatures – and by extension postcolonial literatures, more generally – has often become conflated with narratives of decolonization. Offering some examples of ecocritical work, including by Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, the chapter will also demonstrate that an African ecocritical perspective has indeed “not arrived belatedly.” However, rather than starting with the mid twentieth century, the chapter returns to authors from the beginning of the twentieth century for the ways in which earlier forms of anti-colonial politics can be seen to be articulated through an ecological imaginary that predates formal decolonization by almost half a century.

As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

This chapter analyzes shifts in labor behavior in the context of institutional change. Focusing on the period of structural adjustment (1986–1997), it examines how austerity measures, such as spending cuts and increased labor market flexibility, fractured traditional state–labor alliances in Tunisia and Morocco. The chapter links unions’ responses to these reforms to differences in institutional practices. It argues that Tunisia’s innovations in collective bargaining moderated labor opposition and disrupted alliances between unions and political elites, while Morocco’s institutional stasis, combined with deteriorating economic conditions, generated new incentives for labor unions to mobilize against the regime.

This chapter examines the initial conditions underlying the book’s theory by analyzing authoritarian labor control policies and political developments in Tunisia and Morocco in the postindependence period. It explores how these control strategies shaped unions’ interests, capacities, and perceptions during the early stages of state formation and investigates how relationships between unions and other collective actors influenced the emergence of labor movements. The chapter shows how exclusionary corporatism provided Tunisian unions with organizational resources that strengthened their capacity for opposition, while inclusionary strategies and alliances with political elites weakened labor autonomy in Morocco.

This chapter explores the varied facets through which conceptions of materialism manifest across the larger ecologies of literary production bundled under the rubric “African literature.” It deliberately treats both of these terms – materialism and literature – in their broadest senses. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the various manifestations of materialism which have emerged in studies of African literature, reading materialism variously as critique (in its Marxist/socialist guise), aesthetic (what Zimblar and Etherington call the “materials” of world literature), and context (material worlds and worldings). The chapter then expands on these ideas through a set of literary-focused readings which draw on anglophone, francophone, and other African literatures, largely emphasizing the global circulations of the novel form from 1960 to the present day. This chapter finally concludes by looking at materialism through the twinned concepts of circulation and mediation, exploring the ways in which the material structures which allow a literature to “emerge,” in market terms, simultaneously impact the constitution of the African literary text and its publics.

When does one genre become another? More precisely: When does the pressure that the descriptor “African” exerts on a form become sufficient for it to become another form in the global literary marketplace? This chapter underlines the role of genre theory in regulating the African continent’s literary field by scrutinizing how recent Afrofuturist fictions have intervened in critical debates about literary worlds and their genre-related meanings. The chapter interweaves discussions of three distinct strands of global theoretical thought: (1) the contestation (across decades) between the theorist Darko Suvin and the scholar/novelist China Miéville, on the definitions of science fiction and fantasy; (2) an outline of how a reconsecration of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard worked in tandem with the writings of Wole Soyinka and Harry Garuba to reset the terms of that debate; and (3) an extended reading of how iconic twenty-first-century novels continue to “reprogram” the debate about the genres of African writing.