Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present

Authors

Emma Hunter

Files

Series

Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series

Description

Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and the past, between political theory and political practice, and between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past.

Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa provides a critical reflection on citizenship in Africa by bringing together scholars working with very different case studies and with very different understandings of what is meant by citizenship. By bringing historians and social scientists into dialogue within the same volume, it argues that a revised reading of the past can offer powerful new perspectives on the present, in ways that might also indicate new paths for the future.

The project collects the works of up-and-coming and established scholars from around the globe. Presenting case studies from such wide-ranging countries as Sudan, Mauritius, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia, the essays delve into the many facets of citizenship and agency as they have been expressed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In so doing, they engage in exciting ways with the watershed book in the field, Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject.

Contributors: Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, Frederick Cooper, Solomon M. Gofie, V. Adefemi Isumonah, Cherry Leonardi, John Lonsdale, Eghosa E.Osaghae, Ramola Ramtohul, Aidan Russell, Nicole Ulrich, Chris Vaughan, and Henri-Michel Yéré.

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821445938

Publication Date

2016

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Africa, citizenship, political rights, colonialism, post-colonialism

Disciplines

African History | Legal History

Comments

Funder: Knowledge Unlatched Select 2019: HSS Backlist Books Available in the Open Research Library

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Hunter, Emma, "Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present" (2016). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 24.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/24