This chapter examines how labor mobilization returned to its earlier patterns of political militancy in Tunisia and business unionism in Morocco by the late 2000s. It situates the post-reform period (2000–2011) as a phase of continued decline for labor unions in both countries. However, the chapter links unions’ divergent reactions to differences in their internal governance structures, a legacy from previous experiences of institutional incorporation and exclusion. It highlights how democratic internal organization fosters labor militancy, while hierarchical structures hinder opposition, even when clear incentives to protest exist. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how labor mobilization advanced democratic transition in Tunisia while reinforcing authoritarianism in Morocco.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the key findings of the study and extends the theoretical framework by testing its predictions in four additional authoritarian regimes — Bahrain, Egypt, pre-apartheid South Africa, and Mexico under the PRI. It argues that the most important factor in sustaining labor militancy is autonomy from political elites and strong connections with the rank-and-file. The chapter reinforces the book’s central claim that labor militancy emerges from authoritarian exclusion and the absence of partisan coalitions to represent labor interests. It concludes by discussing the broader implications of these findings for theories of labor politics, authoritarianism, and institutional change.

This chapter establishes the theoretical foundations of the book by reviewing three major explanatory frameworks for labor protest: structural-economic, organizational, and institutional. Using quantitative data, it compares the structural features of Tunisia’s and Morocco’s economies and the organizational profiles of their labor unions. After finding existing explanations wanting, the chapter advances a integrative historical institutional perspective, underscoring the importance of labor incorporation policies, political coalitions, and internal union dynamics in shaping labor’s preferences and capacity for militancy. It argues that authoritarian strategies intended to depoliticize labor can paradoxically empower unions, equipping them with the resources and organizational capacity needed to challenge the state.

Developments in magical realist critical discourse have benefited the study of African literature in several ways. The notion that there is no single point of origin for magical realism refocuses critical attention on African oral traditions, where the supernatural has long mingled with realist elements. And clarity over the nature and purposes of magical realism allows insight into how it simultaneously enables recuperation and critique. This essay considers the history of attempts to theorize magical realism in Africa, before turning to two often-neglected early exemplars of the mode, Thomas Mofolo and Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa’s countryman, Amos Tutuola, developed the African mode of magical realism in flamboyant ways, as did Ben Okri, and, later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In interpreting the work of Ngũgĩ the discussion circles back to global interlocutors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie because, like them, Ngũgĩ self-consciously deploys magical realism to facilitate satire and powerful political critique.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

Premised on the assumption that Afropolitan immobilities are as central to Afropolitanism as the forms of liquid flows and circulations that scholarship on Afropolitanism tends to focalize, this chapter uses modes of spatial and digital immobility in the production of Afropolitan subjectivities to read mainly anglophone Afropolitan literatures. Drawing on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, with occasional references to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Teju Cole’s Open City, the essay lingers on how the mobilities of Afropolitan cultural productions are intimately connected to symbolic and concrete geographies of stasis and technologies of nonmovement. Although Afropolitanism is often discussed as exhibiting affinities with the earlier Pan-Africanism, its ontological poetics similarly connects to digital cosmopolitanism, the condition of digital connectivity that centers the multiple roots and routes of global subjects whose cosmopolitanism is often entangled with forms of immobility and the quotidian use of digital social networks.