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, Cote 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 Yere.

Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania is a study of the interplay of vernacular and global languages of politics in the era of decolonization in Africa. Decolonization is often understood as a moment when Western forms of political order were imposed on non-Western societies, but this book draws attention instead to debates over universal questions about the nature of politics, concept of freedom and the meaning of citizenship. These debates generated political narratives that were formed in dialogue with both global discourses and local political arguments. The United Nations Trusteeship Territory of Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, serves as a compelling example of these processes. Starting in 1945 and culminating with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Emma Hunter explores political argument in Tanzania's public sphere to show how political narratives succeeded when they managed to combine promises of freedom with new forms of belonging at local and national level.

This inaugural volume in the African Perspectives series features the workof new and well-established scholars on the diversity and heterogeneityof African newspapers published from 1880 through the present.Newspapers played a critical role in spreading political awareness amongreaders who were subject to European colonial rule, often engaging inanticolonial and nationalist discourse or popularizing support for Africannationalism and Pan-Africanism. Newspapers also served as incubatorsof literary experimentation and new and varied cultural communities. The contributors highlight the actual practices of newspaper productionat different regional sites and historical junctures, while also developinga set of methodologies and theories of wider relevance to socialhistorians and literary scholars. The first of four thematic sections,“African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work of newspapereditors and contributors in relating local events and concerns to issuesaffecting others across the continent and beyond. “Experiments withGenre” explores the literary culture of newspapers that nurtured thedevelopment of new literary genres, such as newspaper poetry, realistfiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and inEnglish. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in whichAfrican newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communitiesand served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise.The final section, “Afterlives,” is about the longue durée of history thatnewspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentiethcentury, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meantfor posterity.

This inaugural volume in the African Perspectives series features the workof new and well-established scholars on the diversity and heterogeneityof African newspapers published from 1880 through the present.Newspapers played a critical role in spreading political awareness amongreaders who were subject to European colonial rule, often engaging inanticolonial and nationalist discourse or popularizing support for Africannationalism and Pan-Africanism. Newspapers also served as incubatorsof literary experimentation and new and varied cultural communities. The contributors highlight the actual practices of newspaper productionat different regional sites and historical junctures, while also developinga set of methodologies and theories of wider relevance to socialhistorians and literary scholars. The first of four thematic sections,"African Newspaper Networks," considers the work of newspapereditors and contributors in relating local events and concerns to issuesaffecting others across the continent and beyond. "Experiments withGenre" explores the literary culture of newspapers that nurtured thedevelopment of new literary genres, such as newspaper poetry, realistfiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and inEnglish. "Newspapers and Their Publics" looks at the ways in whichAfrican newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communitiesand served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise.The final section, "Afterlives," is about the longue duree of history thatnewspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentiethcentury, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meantfor posterity.

Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania is a study of the interplay of vernacular and global languages of politics in the era of decolonization in Africa. Decolonization is often understood as a moment when Western forms of political order were imposed on non-Western societies, but this book draws attention instead to debates over universal questions about the nature of politics, concept of freedom and the meaning of citizenship. These debates generated political narratives that were formed in dialogue with both global discourses and local political arguments. The United Nations Trusteeship Territory of Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, serves as a compelling example of these processes. Starting in 1945 and culminating with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Emma Hunter explores political argument in Tanzania's public sphere to show how political narratives succeeded when they managed to combine promises of freedom with new forms of belonging at local and national level.