African Studies Now - by Eric Essono Tsimi & Andrea Behrends & Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Hardcover)

About the Book

A comprehensive analysis of the evolving landscape of African studies in the new millennium

Book Synopsis

This edited volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolving landscape of African studies in the new millennium. It details new trends, approaches, and theoretical frameworks that have the potential to shape the future of the discipline. Curated by the up-and-coming scholar Eric Tsimi in collaboration with the distinguished anthropologist Andrea Behrends and field-leading decolonial theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, this collection explores methods and approaches being developed across the humanities and social sciences for decolonizing knowledge, facilitating knowledge transfer, and addressing perceived gaps between theory and practical emergencies.

For its broad coverage of a broad interdisciplinary field, as well as for its in-depth insights into the latest developments within the field as a whole, African Studies Now is a must-have for researchers and students of African studies, global development, indigenous studies, and related fields and disciplines.

Review Quotes

"Amidst ongoing debates around "decolonizing" academic disciplines--debates that have often remained focused on and in the Global North--African Studies Now offers a timely and critical intervention. Across an impressive range of disciplines (history, anthropology, philosophy, political science), this volume recentres African perspectives, rethinks approaches, and refreshes our conceptual vocabularies. Above all, the contributions assembled here assert Francophone Africa as a vibrant site of intellectual and cultural production: that is, where some of the most important and exciting conversations in African Studies are happening, right now." --Doyle D. Calhoun, University of Cambridge, UK

About the Author

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Zimbabwean-born historian and a leading theorist of decolonial studies. He is Professor of History and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Pluralistic Societies at the University of Calgary in Canada. Previously, he was Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and he has also served in professorial roles at UNISA in South Africa.

Eric Essono Tsimi is Associate Professor of Francophone African Studies at Northwestern University, USA. His research links literature, political culture, and the economies of publishing in Francophone Africa, with particular emphasis on racialization, editorial ecologies, and decolonial critique. He holds dual doctorates from the University of Virginia and from Université Grenoble-Alpes/Lausanne. A writer across genres including scholarship, fiction, and essays, he also contributes to public debate in venues such as Le Monde, Jeune Afrique, and The Conversation.

Andrea Behrends is Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. Her work analyzes mobility, displacement, conflict, aid, and resource governance in African contexts, with long-term fieldwork in the Chad-Sudan borderlands and West Africa. Prior to Leipzig, she held the professorship in Social and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Africa at the University of Bayreuth, and she served as President of the African Studies Association in Germany (VAD) from 2021 to 2023.