This chapter explores how political and economic institutions shaped labor mobilization during the early phase of neoliberal reform (1970–1985). It reviews the impact of these reforms on unions in Tunisia and Morocco and analyzes their divergent responses. The chapter examines how practices of institutional incorporation and/or exclusion affected the alliances that unions forged with authoritarian elites and opposition groups. The analysis reveals that labor exclusion perpetuated union militancy in Tunisia, while partisan alliances and incorporation into formal politics moderated labor opposition in Morocco.

The introduction offers a rationale for the book, historicizes both African literature’s development and progress and its critical/theoretical touchstones, and offers an overview of the volume’s three sections and chapters.

This chapter asks if there are specifically African varieties of what in the 1990s became known as postcolonialism. Sociologically, academic postcolonialism was a consequence of mobility between the North and the South. Perhaps because of this, it was often received hesitantly in Africa – hence the importance of looking more closely at its localized uptake. Taking Anthony Appiah’s seminal article on postmodernism and postcolonialism as one point of departure, the chapter traces this delicate balance between Africa-focused and outward-oriented thinking in work by David Attwell (South Africa), Inocência Mata (in relation to Angola), and Ana Mafalda Leite (Mozambique), among others. Of importance here is the alternative to Marxist analysis that postcolonialism provided at the time, as well as its critique of nationalism, but also how postcolonialism’s afterlife in Africanist thinking today is registered in the turn to popular and everyday aspects of culture.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle driving the study: Why are Tunisian unions militant and political in their protest behavior, while their Moroccan counterparts remain apolitical and moderate? It outlines the book’s core argument, emphasizing how authoritarian policies of labor exclusion or incorporation shape unions’ interests and capacities by influencing their relationships with political elites and their internal organization. The chapter reviews the current state of research on the topic, situating the study within broader debates on labor politics, authoritarianism, and regime change. It concludes with a justification of the case selection and an overview of the empirical methods guiding the analysis.

Utilizing Safia Elhillo’s poetry as a case study, this chapter explores the role of literary institutions in redefining African poetry. Elhillo, a Sudanese-American poet, challenges traditional geographic and cultural boundaries within the African literary canon through her collection The January Children. Her recognition by prestigious literary prizes, notably the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, exemplifies the expanding scope of what constitutes African poetry. This analysis highlights how institutions, by honoring diasporic poets, have historically configured the African literary tradition to be inclusive of diasporic and transnational experiences. The chapter argues that the essence of this inclusion of diasporic poetry lies in an African imagination that intertwines experiences from varied locales with the specifics of African realities as they migrate across national and continental borders. By examining these dynamics, the chapter underscores a significant shift in the literary canon, showcasing the evolving, multifaceted nature of African literature in a global context.

This chapter explores why African queer fiction and theory is decontextualized and discussed as if it is devoid of a history and proposes a historicization and decolonization of its creativity, criticism, and theory. It foregrounds three questions: What is the theoretical texture of African queer theory and how does it appear in continental discursive practices? Who are the leading writers and critics of African queer fiction, and what are the recurrent leitmotifs in their fiction? How have the representations and/or criticism of African queer fiction evolved over the last sixty years? The answers to the foregoing questions affirm the evolution of depictions of African nonnormative sexualities in African literature from queer denialism to sexual rights activism that contests a singular African heterosexuality. The chapter concludes that African queer experiences in fiction and film have progressed from being deployed as metaphors of pathology, Western corruption, and imperial hypocrisy to humanized “coming-out” narratives in continental sexuality debates.

This chapter accounts for the recurring fixation in African literary discourse on the continuities between African orality and written African literatures. It highlights the astonishing range of the African oral heritage and underscores its deployment in modern African writing as literary nationalism and resistance to cultural imperialism or as facets of Indigenous formalist experimentations. The chapter pays particular attention to the debates that illuminate the implications of the transposition of orality to writing and sets in relief the scholars who have played pivotal roles in that discourse; it equally annotates several representative texts to underscore the quality of orality and the implications of its transposition into writing. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the current state of African orality and envisioning its future in written African literature.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

Before daybreak on March 1966, in a lush small town called Dunkwa-on-Offin, women traders of the Ghana National Trading Corporation, the United African Company, and the Ghana Fishing Corporation adorned their bodies with white clay and calico. Calico represented “victory.” Dunkwa-on-Offin sits halfway between Kumasi – the capital city of the formerly powerful Asante Kingdom to its north – and Cape Coast – the former colonial capital of the British Gold Coast. The women were celebrating the events from the previous month. On February 24, Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah was en route to Hanoi, Vietnam, to visit Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh via China when the National Liberation Council (NLC) instigated a military coup d’état. Nkrumah’s government collapsed. His statues and edifices followed suit. The Chinese embassy was ransacked; some of its personnel were attacked. Violence continued on the streets of Ghana, “anyone who resisted them (NLC) was brutally shot…. Even young children were hit with rifle butts.” The NLC burned any literature on socialism, communism, or Nkrumah. The women were not alone in celebrating the downfall of Nkrumah’s government. Pass-book traders, wide-eyed and impressionable high school students, and Christian and Muslim congregationalists flanked them. Unlike Nkrumah’s return to Colonial Ghana from the United Kingdom (UK) in January 1957, a few months before independence (March 6), where he was greeted by his supporters dressed in calico and dancing and singing to drums, the women traders in Dunkwa-on-Offin sang in support of the NLC.

This chapter reflects on a few crucial terms such as locality and exteriority, arguing from the standpoint that the force of African literature lies in its call to interrogate the very idea of the global and local. Commenting briefly on the early works of two African writers, Chinua Achebe and Assia Djebar, it shows how African literature poses questions about the type of world-making that is underway, namely, who are the beneficiaries and losers in the making and remaking of conceptions of “worldliness”? The essay also speculates on conceptual and theoretical flashpoints that emerge from the encounter between notions of African literature and world literature taken as separate entities. In attempting to recharacterize the theoretical assumptions of “worldliness,” it highlights African writing’s inherent universality, its generalized orientation toward the philosophical, as well as the intersections of terms like locality and universality within African literary criticism.