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Palgrave Macmillan

The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa

  • Book
  • © 2010

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Authors:
  1. Michael Onyebuchi Eze
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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
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  2. Introduction

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 1-15

  3. The “Invention” of Africa: Contested Terrains

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 17-60

  4. Post-colonial Displacements

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 61-87

  5. Africanism: A History of Histories

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 89-133

  6. Beyond a History by Analogy

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 135-156

  7. Cult of Personalities and Politics of Domination

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 157-180

  8. Toward an African Renaissance

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze
    Pages 181-196

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 197-223
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Keywords

About this book

This book mediates a dialectics between power and subjectivity versus history and politics. The invention of Africa is not merely a residue of Africa's encounter with Europe but a project in continuity in contemporary history of Africa, where history has become a location of struggle and meaning, a location of power and domination. Eze contends that postcolonial African studies that thrive by way of unanimity, analogy, or homogenenity are merely advancing a "defeatist" historicism. It attempts to gain essence by inverting the terms of colonial discourse and is decisively implicated in the very logic of coloniality. This method of historiography not only stifles the overall socio-political imagination of contemporary Africa but offers a dogmatic blueprint for politics of domination. Eze argues that a chance for an African Renaissance is dependent on review mechanisms of African historiography.

Reviews

"Eze makes fresh interrogations into our inherited engagements with Africa within a geopolitical space and re-scribes our notions of Africa - a book that is compelling, timely, and well informed." - Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal, India

About the author

MICHAEL ONYBUCHI EZE currently teaches postcolonial African studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany and is the Editor-in-Chief of The African Communitarian: A Journal of African Ethics, Social and Political Thought.

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