This 2021 ASA Presidential Lecture combines sociopolitical history with personal reflections on Black Harlem during African decolonization. It begins at the turn of the twentieth century and traces Harlem’s transformation into an international center of pan-Africanist activism and cultural production. Brown explores solidarities that grew as Harlem politicians, grassroots leaders, and residents encountered political exiles and cultural leaders from the continent, the diaspora, and aligned political movements worldwide. These alliances and modes of protest facilitated a hardening of militant activist traditions and cultural cohesion that shaped an anti-imperialist pan-African movement and ultimately a multinational Black political movement in the 1960’s to 1990s.

What could be called a digital turn has amplified conversations around publics, literary cultures, and African literature’s broadened genres. Drawing on conceptual frameworks and debates from literary, cultural, and media studies, Adeoba examines the literary imaginations and ekphrastic practices that emerge from the digital cultures of African Twitter users. Adeoba argues that crowdsourced verse demonstrates the creative agency of digitally connected everyday people and newer modes of sociality enabled by African poetry in digital contexts. Crowdsourced verse presents opportunities to examine the digital publics of African literature and their contributions to the body of literary works circulating in digital spaces.

In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped almost three hundred girls attending school in Chibok, Nigeria. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign emerged as a global activist movement in the aftermath of that kidnapping. Onah’s article analyzes the global mediascapes of the campaign to show the mnemonic affordances of the Chibok girls’ kidnapping and the intermedial dynamics that coalesced to make it a global memory phenomenon. By foregrounding the transhistorical and intermedial connections at the core of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, it consolidates the understanding of remediation in memory studies. Consequently, Onah proposes new ways to understand African memorial traditions and testimonial practices in an increasingly hyperconnected world.

African contemporary choreographers increasingly delink from Eurocentric performance conventions and work toward establishing local conditions of production and consumption by performing in public spaces. Although the labor undertaken to shift power asymmetries does not always result in structural changes, their art may be considered decolonial creative expression. Based on ethnographic research at the third and fourth editions (2022 and 2023) of Fatou Cissé’s street performance festival, La ville en mouv’ment (The City in Movement), in Dakar, Senegal, the author argues that decolonial potentiality extends beyond the precarious economic conditions to encapsulate the artists’ return to public space and futurist aesthetics.

Studies of protest in contemporary Africa often fail to address three related dynamics. First, rural radicalism has long been more central to African political struggles, even urban ones, than is commonly recognized. Second, the ongoing transformation of rural political economies links them to those of urban areas and has changed struggles over land and resources. Finally, these changes have reduced the power of traditional authorities and increased the appeal of nonviolent protest, as well as shifting protest toward a more national mode in which rural populations are increasingly central. Mampilly elaborates on these propositions, which are derived from brief examinations of both historical and contemporary examples of rural protest across Africa, before applying them to a deep analysis of LUCHA, a social movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Drawing on their own field studies, the authors examine how state and local actors involved in resource management and peacebuilding activities are implicated in the conflict between farmers and herders in Plateau State, Nigeria, and Central Darfur State, Sudan. The authors show that state officials, traditional chiefs, and security agents intensified the conflict by perpetuating the inequitable distribution of resources needed for the survival of farmers and herders, while promoting a peacebuilding process that empowered some groups and disempowered others. The divisive role state and local actors played accentuated the socio-political grievances underlying the conflict and enervated the peacebuilding process.

This article analyzes a 2018 protest instigated by rural activists in northern Uganda, who chose to contest violent state-driven evictions by peacefully occupying a UN compound in the urban center of Gulu. With their contribution to this ASR forum on rural radicalism, Laing and Weschler argue that in militarized contexts such as Uganda, remote geographies present rural political actors pursuing radical goals with certain advantages but also unique challenges. The case they examine demonstrates the capacity of rural activists to draw on rural-urban ties and a tactic they have dubbed “third-party leverage” to imaginatively circumvent such constraints.

The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

Since at least the colonial era, the Central African Republic (CAR) has been a hotbed of rural rebellion and protest. This article explores the political discourses of members of the Anti-Balaka, a diffuse protest movement and armed rebellion, comparing discourses to see how they vary in relation to demographic categories: urban and rural, elites and peasants. Lombard and Vlavonou find that rural peasants demand a moral economy of interpersonal respect, while elite (usually urban) adherents claim inclusion in a system of official recognition and patronage. Both are concerned with respect, but what is radical about the vision of the peasants is that they can enact it on their own.

Sabina Yuhas (@Overszabi) and Juliana Belova (@juliewanderz or Oyibo Marlian) are Hungarian and Russian women, respectively, who are fascinated by Nigerian popular culture. Despite their successes in exploiting Black culture to attain wealth and fame in the Nigerian mediasphere, their works have hardly been studied. Close readings and nuanced analyses of their selected TikTok skits show a multiplicity of images that are neither fully European nor Nigerian—equivocal identities—mediating Otherness. However, the longstanding power asymmetries between Africa and Europe characterize their enactments as commodification of Blackness, accounting for why Nigerians who perform “Europeanness” do not attain corresponding success.

To date, there is no systematic research on the overlapping challenges of wildlife conservation and security in South Sudan, where the wildlife service (WLS) has institutionally survived for over a century while contending with poor state capacity and responsibility for protected areas (PAs) that cover vast territories characterized by chronic insecurity and food scarcity. Integrated into the country’s “Organized Forces,” South Sudan’s park rangers play roles beyond conservation as armed actors in complex conflicts. Data obtained from archival research and field interviews shows that South Sudan’s wildlife authorities have persisted since the colonial period in spite and because of chronic warfare.

Many studies on China-Africa encounters have demonstrated the significance of ethnic and racial identities in these encounters. I reverse this perspective and ask: in what circumstances are China-Africa encounters shaped by identities other than racial and ethnic ones? Drawing on my ethnographic research in the construction industry in Congo-Brazzaville, I argue that the actions of many Chinese are often more influenced by their economic roles, such as workers, managers, and entrepreneurs than by their ethnic identity. Their identities are thus realigned in the economic encounters which I term “project assemblages.” This concept highlights the fluidity of multiple identities in economic encounters and shows that China-Africa encounters are a fertile ground for producing theories, beyond the China-Africa framework, on lived experiences of economic relationships.

Around the world, armed conflict is increasingly occurring in capital cities and governments are relying on pro-government, rurally recruited, militia to suppress anti-government political violence. Pendle and Maror draw lessons from South Sudan where recruits from rural areas were brought to Juba to help defend the government. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with combatants, this article uses “rural radicalism” to argue that patterns of violence by these rurally recruited forces were shaped by histories of rural violence over previous decades and can be read to include a political objective that challenges the inequities in safety and security between rural areas and the capital city.

Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.

Scholars have emphasized the importance and autonomy of African intermediaries in European imperial projects. However, intermediaries have not been studied as founders of (proto) colonial administrations. Between 1840 and 1874, the inchoate British establishment on the Gold Coast was largely a project of Anglo-African merchants, rooted in their political visions of “progress.” Merchants like James Bannerman provided infrastructure, institutions, and material form to the administration and intended it as a force for development. Ultimately, the British administration exercised its hegemony through Euro-African infrastructures, spaces, and ideas. Consequently, merchants like Bannerman undermined their local networks, rulers, and dependents who opposed British domination.

In the African Studies literature “transformation” emerges as a capacious discursive field and project of state power. In this Keyword article, I move from postindependence questions of transformative social change to violence as a transformative project of the nation-state, examining its imbrication with questions of transition and state aftermaths. I analyze transformation as a promise of worldmaking around horizons of the “post”: postapartheid, postconflict, and postcolonial. I then consider textures of transformative urbanism in changing African cities, and analyze processes implicated in reclaiming forms of discard, positing transformation as recuperation. Transformation is ultimately a multidirectional conceptual field capable of remaking personal worlds and theoretical orientations.