Scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, and V. Y. Mudimbe have pointed out that the idea of Africa was designed to legitimize Western imperialism. This raises the question as to whether or not this idea can metamorphose into a liberating concept. Nevertheless, between the 1950s and 1980s, numerous creative writers almost invariably wrote poems, plays, and novels that focused on the identities of their various peoples, while taking the African identity as a given in their formal academic ruminations contained in their essays. Consequently, this chapter explores the extent to which the portrayals of the cultural identities of the peoples of Africa in numerous literary works by creative writers from the continent, and the African identity taken for granted in the bulk of the theoretical works by the same authors, point to a discrepancy in their presentations of the nature of postcolonial reconstruction. The thesis of the chapter is that foregrounding the names of the continent’s various peoples in scholarship would acknowledge their rich and highly diverse cultures, thereby significantly mitigating baseless continent-wide generalizations. We can then still talk of “African literature,” “African philosophy,” and “African history,” among others, but in a highly circumscribed manner.

Drawing from the economic, political, and security records of the Kế Bào Coal Company – one of the first two large-scale French coal mining companies established in Tonkin – this chapter tracks the rise and fall of the company and offers a labor, social, and racial history of the many pioneers of the coal frontier, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese migrant coal mine workers, the Vietnamese convicts, and the French personnel. By situating the history of large-scale coal mining in Kế Bào within the regional context of the Sino-Vietnamese borderland and the global coolie trade of the nineteenth century, this chapter illustrates the risks and precarities of coal mining along a remote maritime coal frontier in the early days of French colonialism in Tonkin. Specifically, it highlights the perils of financial miscalculation, labor mismanagement, overoptimistic and incomplete geological surveys, and the environmental and ecological challenges of extracting coal in a tropical landscape unfamiliar to Europeans, all of which contributed to the company’s downfall.

This chapter explores the transformations of Christianity in African novels. While it is clear from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that Africans believed in a supreme God before the intervention of missionaries, most postcolonial novels describe the role played by the advent of the “new” God in the consolidation of colonialism. The collusion between church, capitalism, and colonial administration is well illustrated by several authors from different linguistic backgrounds. However, with the rise of theologies of liberation, novelists like V. Y. Mudimbe and Pius Ngandu Nkashama have revisited the role and function of the church in postcolonial settings. They put God’s name to task in order to challenge the inconsistencies and disillusionments born out of independence. With the proliferation of Pentecostal churches, God has remained a key plot driver in postcolonial narratives. From domination to liberation, the African religious and spiritual landscape has shifted significantly over the decades. This chapter uses postcolonial scholarship to investigate the ways in which the name of God has shaped narratives in various geographies of the African continent. From colonial priests to liberation leaders, the face of missionaries is totally transformed in African novels.

This chapter considers how colonialism (and its legacy in the postcolonial period) has influenced the articulation of the geographical space of Algiers as a lieu de mémoire in works of fiction written by contemporary Algerian authors of French expression. “Under what historical conditions is a city, and a postcolonial city at that, transformed into a ‘site of memory’?” asks scholar Réda Bensmaïa referring to Algiers. Is Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire framework valid for the colonized as well as the colonizer? From 1962 forward, Algerian authors of French expression have sought to identify spaces that they thought necessary for the progress of the postcolonial nation. For authors such as Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, and Assia Djebar, remembering and memory are essential to building national postcolonial identity. These authors were born post-1962 and reside for the most part in Algeria. The chapter studies Samir Toumi’s Alger, le cri (2013) and Kaouther Adimi’s Nos richesses (2017) for what they say about the legacies of colonialism, the Revolution, and the more recent civil war of the 1990s to early 2000s.

This chapter provides a geographical, ethnic, and economic overview of the coal mining frontier of Quảng Yên in northern Vietnam during the precolonial period, before large-scale coal mining began in the late nineteenth century. The first part of this chapter highlights the ethnic diversity, political volatility, rampant piracy, cross-border smuggling, and illicit trade that characterized this porous Sino-Vietnamese borderland, where state surveillance was often absent. The chapter also examines precolonial mining patterns, the Nguyễn dynasty’s mining policies, and the role of the Chinese in precolonial mining exploitation in Vietnam. Notably, the chapter attributes the decline of the precolonial mining economy in Vietnam to several environmental, political, and technological factors. The last part of this chapter documents the French struggle to stabilize and pacify this complex and volatile mining frontier in the late nineteenth century, paving the way for the region’s first large-scale coal mining enterprises and mining settlements.

This chapter offers, first, some how-to tips for close analysis of documents and other texts to uncover a greater range and depth of meaning. Examining the choice of words, the grammatical structures, and the leaps of logic within metaphors and other figures of speech can yield fresh insight into the assumptions, the categories of analysis, and the overt as well as the less conscious agendas of historical actors. Cadence, inflection, repetition, and even silences can in this sense “speak.xy4 Physical presentation, cultural practices, and personal behaviors can suggest how leaders oriented themselves toward others and their likely intents. Second, this chapter explains how historians can read sources for evidence of the interplay between more emotional and more rational modes of thinking. Historians studying the emotions do not need training in neuroscience or psychology. Rather, they need to read texts carefully and evaluate such evidence as discussion of emotion, words signifying emotion, emotion-provoking tropes, and bodily actions triggered by emotion. Also significant is language evidencing excited behaviors, ironies, silences – and the cultural milieus of these and other expressions. Like all historical evidence, such signs of emotion should be interpreted and contextualized rather than taken at face value.

This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.

The national security paradigm is a comprehensive framework or methodology that relates variables to one another and allows for diverse interpretations of American foreign policy in particular periods and contexts. National security policy encompasses the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats. This definition underscores the relationship of the international environment to the internal situation in the United States and accentuates the importance of people’s ideas and perceptions in constructing the nature of external dangers as well as the meaning of national identity, American ideals, and vital interests. This chapter outlines the key tasks to employ a national security methodology, beginning with identifying the key decision-makers, for example by reading memoirs, diaries, biographies, and oral histories. It then discusses the sources to use to appraise how these decision-makers assessed the intentions and capabilities of prospective foes, as well as perceptions of their own country’s strength and cohesion, the lessons of the past, the impact of technological innovations, and the structural patterns of the international system. The chapter emphasizes the importance of using empathy, understanding the core values of the past, and defining the meaning of power.

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of selected works by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Legson Kayira, Charles Mungoshi, Aldino Muianga, Miriam Tlali, and Yvonne Vera to foreground the historical and material presence of migrants from other Southern African countries in Johannesburg’s literary archive. Tracing trajectories of change and continuity in the post-apartheid migrant city, the chapter shows how South African texts have shifted from employing intra-African migrants as marginal figures or metaphors for post-apartheid urban precariousness and/or multiculture toward more nuanced depictions of migrants as embodied urban agents post-2008. While Johannesburg at best serves as a fragile home for migrant and diasporic characters who often remain dislocated or temporary sojourners in the city, the urban imaginaries by intra-African diasporic authors bring into focus narratives obfuscated by a narrow linguistic and national literary history of Johannesburg, reclaiming the continent’s long-standing place in the city’s literary archive.

The past is freighted for queer Africans. Because of the ubiquitous accusation of being “un-African,” envisioning historical existence for same-gender-loving and gender-diverse Africans offers the promise of establishing cultural authenticity in the present. Queer pasts, however, tend to be elusive, complex, and contested – as recent novels explore. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea gives readers glimpses of a queer relationship from the past through two unreliable witnesses recounting their differing versions of what happened many years later, underlining the inevitable mediation of memory and narration. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing places a more straightforwardly “gay” character in the 1790s, but this biracial, culturally hybrid figure entangles homosexuality with the history of slavery. Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu and Nakisanze Segawa’s The Triangle take on a queer past that has been leveraged for homophobic ends, rather than leading to an acceptance of gay people – the story of late nineteenth-century Bugandan leader Mwanga II. Mwanga’s execution of Christian pages has been represented by missionaries then and Ugandan politicians now as the result of demonic homosexual desire. Kintu’s and The Triangle’s counter-interpretations of this historical nexus show the past and present to be linked sites of political struggle, rather than seeing the past as the source of an authenticated belonging.

Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.