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Future Africa—beyond the Nation?
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Future Africa—beyond the Nation?

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "History in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2019) | Viewed by 7595

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Susanne Lachenicht

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Chair of Early Modern History, Universitaet Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, Germany
Interests: early Modern European and Atlantic History with focus on migrations, confessional and religious history, religious minorities and diasporas; media and Press History (18th to 20th centuries); French Revolution, Atlantic Revolutions; social and cultural history of the Enlightenment; history of cartography as history of knowledge; economic history as cultural history; historical theory and philosophy of history
Dr. Annalisa Urbano

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Département d’histoire Générale, Université de Genève, 1211 Genève 4, Switzerland
Interests: history of Africa; greater Somalia; Italian colonial history

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The “nation” has more often than not been described as “the” category of collective belonging in the modern period. With our special issue we want to ask about alternative or entangled (social) constructions of the "we" and the "other", constructions developed by Africans and African diasporas between the 18th and 20th centuries.

We discuss how concepts, social constructions such as the "nation", "religion", "clan", “family”, "class", "genealogies", "race", "origin" and other interact and intertwine. We want to look into the effects these categories of collective belonging have on the building of societies, for statehood, states, forms of government, empires, confederacies.

Also, we are interested in the role resources, economies, economic interests play in these visions of statehood and societies within or beyond the nation state. Are visions of statehood (other than the nation state) deliberately opposing so-called western concepts of the nation and/or nation state or are they integrating it?

Much in line with this is the question whether these visions of future statehood and societies are based on past experiences or constructions of the past. Further, with which timescapes/temporalities do these concepts of belonging and statehood come?

Another set of questions that some of the papers will discuss are linked to the historical contexts in which visions of statehood and society beyond (or complementary to) the "nation"/"nation-state" arise.

Finally, do these visions of belonging and state-hood materialize? Do they fail? And if so, why? And in which moments in history?

Prof. Susanne Lachenicht
Dr. Annalisa Urbano
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Africa
  • nations
  • nationalism
  • state-building
  • decolonization
  • categories of collective identity

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

11 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
Socialist Federalism as an Alternative to Nationalism: The Leninist Solution to the National Question in Africa and Its Diaspora
by Constantin Katsakioris
Humanities 2019, 8(3), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030152 - 19 Sep 2019
Viewed by 3472
Abstract
Scholarship on the impact of Lenin’s thinking and on the Soviet Union’s relationships with Africa has emphasized two dimensions: on the one hand, the ideological imprint on and support provided to nationalist and anti-imperialist movements and, on the other, the emulation of communist [...] Read more.
Scholarship on the impact of Lenin’s thinking and on the Soviet Union’s relationships with Africa has emphasized two dimensions: on the one hand, the ideological imprint on and support provided to nationalist and anti-imperialist movements and, on the other, the emulation of communist techniques of authoritarian rule by many postcolonial governments. This paper highlights the neglected receptions of another major communist idea, namely, the ‘Leninist solution to the national question’, as embodied by the federal political model of the Soviet Union. The paper argues that many actors in different contexts, where the nationalities question had to be tackled with, showed a keen interest in the Leninist solution and in the sui generis federal model of the USSR. These contexts included the post-1945 French Union, as well as postcolonial countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The Leninist alternative to the nation-state and to assimilation assumed a great deal of significance to minority groups. Nevertheless, it was rejected even by Marxist-inspired movements and elites which sought to create a nation-state. The paper uses the approach of cultural transfers to investigate and assess both the appeal and the limits in the reception of the Leninist federalist alternative. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Future Africa—beyond the Nation?)
15 pages, 293 KiB  
Article
Nation, Ethnicity, Milieus, and Multiple “We’s”. The Case of Kenya
by Dieter Neubert
Humanities 2019, 8(3), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030139 - 12 Aug 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3534
Abstract
The title of the volume “Future Africa—beyond the nation?” has several implications. Nation is presented as an entity relevant to identification and identity; and in the combination with “future”, nation implies a political vision. It is not hard to find good examples in [...] Read more.
The title of the volume “Future Africa—beyond the nation?” has several implications. Nation is presented as an entity relevant to identification and identity; and in the combination with “future”, nation implies a political vision. It is not hard to find good examples in respect of these implications. However, there are other entities important for to political identification. Often, they do not go beyond the nation but refer to smaller collective identities, such as ethnicity. The revived debate on “the middle class” implies that particular social groupings, such as class, may play a role, too. The question is how relevant are the nation and other collective political identities in Africa, and are they exclusive? Looking at the case of Kenya, we see on the one hand that collective (political) identities, such as ethnicity, are mobilized especially during elections. On the other hand, these collective identities are less dominant in everyday life and give way to different conducts of life (conceptualized as “milieus”) that are less politicized. We see people maneuvering between multiple “we’s”. Strong political identities are mobilized only in particular conflict-loaded situations that restructure identities in simple binary oppositions of “we” and “they”. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Future Africa—beyond the Nation?)
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