Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation. This volume collects an array of essays that reflect on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. The volume considers archive in a Derridean sense, as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of the African anticolonial archive is one that involves a contemporary process of curating. The essays in this volume, as well as the volume itself, enact different ways of curating material from this period. The project reflects an approach to documents, arguments, and materials that can be considered “international relations” and “world politics,” but in ways that that intentionally leaves them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. While we examine many of the same questions that have been asked within area studies, African studies, and International Relations, we do so through an alternative archive. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that Africa is solely the domain of policy makers and area studies, and African peoples as the objects of data. Shiera Sharafuddin el-Malik is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at DePaul University. Her research is guided by an interest in the intersection of politics of knowledge and lived experience. She has published articles in the Review of International Studies, African Identities, Journal of Contemporary African Studies amongst other journals and edited volumes. She was an Irish Research Council Fellow at Dublin City University. Isaac Kamola is an Assistant Professor in Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College. His scholarly work has appeared in International Political Sociology, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, African Identities, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Third World Quarterly, Polygraph, and Transitions as well as numerous edited volumes. Isaac was previously an American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow at the Johns Hopkins and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities.