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Conceptualizing Africa

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MbembeAchille and SarrFelwine, eds., BurkDrew, trans. To Write the Africa World. Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2023. vii + 324 pp. Notes. Index. $28.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-1-5095-5107-1.

AdeTaharka. W.E.B. Du Bois’ Africa: Scrambling for a New Africa. New York: Anthem Press, 2023. xx + 157 pp. References. Index. $110. Hardback. ISBN: 9781839988493.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2024

Melvin E. Page*
Affiliation:
East Tennessee State University, USA [email protected]

Extract

A gathering of African intellectuals in 2016—Ateliers de la Pensée I [Workshops of Thought]—aimed to be a “renewal of French-speaking Afro-diasporic critical thinking; it also served as an impetus for generating new perspectives concerning … Africa’s future” (2). Somewhat ironically, the participants—some of whose essays appear in To Write the Africa World—seem to have widely accepted one key idea as a significant part of their thinking: double consciousness. First clearly articulated more than a century before by W.E.B. Dubois, that awareness reverberates through many of their twenty-one collected articles. Yet only one among them, Hourya Bentouhami, actually mentions “DuBois’s reflections” on the subject, describing them “as a strange and painful cognitive disjunction … in the dialogue of the soul with itself”(125). Another contributor, Benaouda Lebdai, instead credits Sudanese born British writer Jamal Maljoub with integrating “his status of being double” as part of his authorial identity (53). Other writers of essays included in the book merely assume an understanding of the concept as fundamental to their thought and, perhaps more importantly, in conveying a concept of Africa to the wider world.

Type
Scholarly Review Essay
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of African Studies Association

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