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Abstract:
One of the paradoxes of the making of African nations and African identities is the recent metamorphoses and mutations of African nationalism from civic principles founded on the slogan of ‘diverse people unite’ to narrow, autochthonous, nativist and xenophobic forms that breed violence. This article seeks to examine key contours in the making of African identities, with a specific focus on historical, cartographic, and hegemonic processes that coalesced towards the creation of a particular kind of nationalism that failed to create a stable African common identity within postcolonial states. Beginning with the making of the African continent itself (as both an idea and reality), the article delves deeper into the pertinent issues in the making of Africans-as-people. At the centre of analysis are the key identity-forming processes such as the Atlantic slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, as well as ideologies like Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Negritude, African Personality, Black Consciousness Movement, and African Renaissance. The central challenge in the struggle of forging stable African identities remains that of how to negotiate and blend together diversities of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, region, language, culture, generation as well as how to deal with the phenomenon of degeneration of plural and civic forms of nationalism into nativism, xenophobia and even genocides in recent years. These issues need serious and unsententious consideration at this juncture when African leaders are busy toying with and implementing the mega-project of establishing the United States of Africa. This is taking place within a terrain dominated by bigotry and prejudices on the African continent.
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, Contributed by: Rens ColletAbstract: This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the post-1945 United Nations normative order, the Cold War epoch that ended in 1989, the current neoliberal dispensation as well as the post 9/11 anti-terrorism and securitization. While Africans have actively contested Euro–North American hegemony throughout these periods, they have not yet succeeded in breaking the strong global technologies of coloniality that continue to prevent the possibilities of African agency. This is why this article ends with a call for deepening the decolonization and deimperialization of the international order in the twenty-first century.
Comment: Useful for offering alternate perspective to Wallerstein's world system theory. Theorizes not about the detrimental effects of colonialism, put also offers a more constructivist approach to analyzing Africa's current position in the world system.
Comment: This article contends with the development of African nationalism, arguing that the various historical processes that combined to produce Africa as an idea and cartographic reality and African identity as a contingent phenomenon are useful in understanding the postcolonial problems facing Africa, including territorialised autochthony, nativism and xenophobia. As such, the author argues that African identities and nationalism are products of complex histories of "domination, resistance, complicity, creolisation, and mimicry – mediated by various vectors of identity such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, region, region and generation". This article is useful for students of modern African politics and history, as a kind of long duree study of the effects of the various phenomena that have affected the development of African identities and African nationalism over the course of history.