continental

Continental

Action required

Held in Nairobi this month, the inaugural Africa Climate Summit is an important step for the continent’s response to climate change. Still, the disasters in Libya and Morocco underscore that rhetoric and declarations are not enough.

Shifting the guilt

Even though Israeli novelist Agur Schiff’s latest book is meant to be a satirical reflection on the legacy of slavery and stereotypes about Africa, it ends up reinforcing them.

On safari

On our annual publishing break, we’ll be pondering what the responsibility of the African intellectual is today.

A tale of two reviews

In the 1960s, two African nationalist magazines shared a name—but declassified files reveal that they were on opposite sides of a literary Cold War.

False progress

From 2024, the Grammys will feature an award for Best African Music Performance. Is the category a positive step embracing the global popularity of African music, or another homogenizing exotification?

Africa for Africans

After World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States were not only locked in an ideological struggle with each other, but also competed with an anticolonial vision of modernity, an ideology which is still influential today.

Pat Robertson’s Africa

The ultra-conservative American televangelist Pat Robertson has died. As poisonous as his influence on American politics was, Robertson’s legacy in Africa is even more cynical.

How to think about colonialism

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

Resistance is a continuous endeavor

For more than 75 years, Palestinians have organized for a liberated future. Today, as resistance against Israeli apartheid intensifies, unity and revolutionary optimism has become the main infrastructure of struggle.

The two Africas

In the latest controversies about race and ancient Egypt, both the warring ‘North Africans as white’ and ‘black Africans as Afrocentrists’ camps find refuge in the empty-yet-powerful discourse of precolonial excellence.