~This book emerged from a series of discussions, conference panels, and considerable feedback over the course of many years. We tested the initial idea of this book before an ‘empty-room’ session at the International Studies Association (ISA) – Northeast (2014) and a ‘standing-room only’ session a year later at ISA in...

Shiera el-Malik and Isaac Kamola’s Politics of African Anticolonial Archive is a timely book because the very project of anticolonial resistance and its relationship to decolonization and imperialism needs urgent reconceptualizing. Such a reconceptualization has been necessitated by the various political agreements that were put in place across the continent to achieve independence....

~On 3 October 1984, Thomas Sankara – former guerrilla fighter and president of Burkina Faso – addressed a rally at the Harriet Tubman School in Harlem. Organized by the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, the rally took place on the eve of Sankara’s address to the United Nations General...

~The aim of the postcolonial project of decolonizing the archives was to support new utopias. This task has not been entirely successful, in part because of a profound misunderstanding within the postcolonial world of the nature, constitution, and ideological dimensions of the European or Western archetypes that they sought to emulate. The problem...

~Recently, I asked students in a course on feminism and international studies to construct their own Twitter-based research projects. I asked them to follow people on Twitter, see what moved them, and decide what they wanted to look at. The assignment was deliberately vague. I wanted them to find their own interests and to see what questions...

~I have recently started to make some initial steps in researching the political thought and practice of the anticolonial liberation movements of Portugal’s African colonies – Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe.My research focuses...

~Amílcar Cabral is probably best known for his 1966 speech at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in which he declared that ‘if it is true that a revolution can fail, even though it be nurtured on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet successfully practiced Revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (Cabral 1979c,...

~I start my story in Brussels, in a park paved with the traces of the dead. Under my feet are the remnants of the gravestones that once ran row behind row as testaments to the dead. What was once a municipal cemetery is now a public park in a quiet area of the Belgian capital, the Parc Georges Henri in the commune of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert....

When I first met Chris Azaare, he introduced himself as a retired school teacher who was still teaching part time in two local schools and serving on the Parent-Teacher Association. It soon became apparent, however, that he was a man of multiple talents; Chris is also a well-known public intellectual, a trained meteorologist, a professional soccer referee, a long-term custodian of his family gods,...

~It was a hot morning in late November. We were drinking pito in the sun-drenched courtyard of the earthen palace of...

 

~When I purchased Madlib’s 2010 album Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, I did so at a moment when I was seeking some much-needed distance (and relief) from a PhD dissertation near completion, a study that examines the impact of Tanzanian nationhood on US and Caribbean Black Power politics and identities during the 1960s and...

~Responding to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, Christopher Okigbo penned the following couplet in his ‘Lament of the Silent Sisters’.

‘The archive is a status.’ Through acts of ‘discrimination and selection,’ it grants a privileged status to those documents deemed archivable by setting them apart (Mbembe 2002, 20). It is also a ‘chronophagic’ meta-status (Mbembe 2002, 23). It...

~academy, 7–9,...

~Professor Pal Ahluwalia has been the pro vice-chancellor (Research and Innovation) at the Universality of Portsmouth since October 2014. His main research interests lie in the areas of African studies and social and cultural theory. His work is widely published and is internationally renowned for breaking down disciplinary boundaries and...

This is the first series to mark out a dedicated space for advanced critical inquiry into colonial questions across International Relations. The ethos of this book series is reflected by the bricolage constituency of Kilombos – settlements of African slaves, rebels and indigenous peoples in South America who became self-determining political communities that retrieved and renovated the...