This chapter follows the creation, adoption, and impact of the numerous constitutions implemented in colonial Nigeria, ultimately pushing the region toward adopting a more federal system of government. This chapter will contain overviews of the five important constitutions created in the colonial period, while also exploring the factors which drove the colonial government to push the region toward federalism and the greater inclusion of native Nigerians. It will identify two primary periods of constitution-making, one before World War II and one after, pushed more vigorously by nationalist groups. Federalism, codified by Nigeria’s consecutive implementation of different constitutions, promoted regionalism, causing the growth of ethnic nationalism. Consequently, ruling groups benefiting from previous, more unitary systems, like Northern Nigeria’s emirs, and small minority ethnic groups fearing the influence of larger groups, opposed the growth of federalism. As Nigeria transitioned into an independent nation, it walked a fine line between an oppressive unitary system and a chaotic federal one. This balancing act defined its constitutions and political landscapes during Nigeria’s colonial period, and continues to do so today.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

Chapter 6 goes beyond a conclusion, calling more broadly for a serious appreciation of the political projects of African elites in critical geopolitics. This field has largely omitted African actors, discussing them, if at all, as being affected by the geopolitical ambitions of others such as China, United States, or France, rather than being considered as having active agency in shaping international politics. The chapter recaptures the African military politics that surrounded different proposals for military deployment for the Sahel as they were shaped by the foreign policy ambitions of South African president Jacob Zuma, Chadian president Idriss Déby Itno, the Algerian Commissioners for Peace and Security at the African Union Commission, as well as Nigerian politicians and bureaucrats from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). By drawing on the empirical insights of Chapters 1–5, Döring emphasizes the importance of studying spatial semantics in more general terms and how this provides a better understanding of changing paradigms for military action. This, as argued in the last part of the chapter, is indispensable in the current climate of re-emerging illiberal, nationalist, and authoritarian geopolitical narratives.

Pan-African thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed innovative ideas that challenged the racialized hierarchies of the world economy. Some of these thinkers are discussed in previous chapters, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both discussed in chapter 7) as well as Amy Ashwood Garvey (chapter 10). This chapter discusses three other prominent Pan-African thinkers who sought to cultivate the transnational economic solidarity of Africans and the African diaspora in order to challenge this group’s subordinate position in the world economy. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the best-known popularizer of this kind of “economic Pan-Africanism” via his Universal Negro Improvement Association and its Black Star Line. The other two discussed in the chapter are W.E.B. Du Bois (from the United States) and Hubert Harrison (who migrated from the Danish West Indies to the United States). The latter two disagreed with Garvey and each other about a number of issues, ranging from their views of capitalism to the role of the African diaspora in Pan-African politics.

The political struggles that delivered the first wave of independent Caribbean nation states are often retrospectively characterised under the banner of nationalism, but it is important to acknowledge the diversity of ideologies and affiliations that were involved in the transition towards non-colonial sovereignty. This chapter explores the role that writers and imaginative writings played in shaping alternative political imaginaries in the Anglophone Caribbean region from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its arguments expand the terrain of literary nationalisms beyond the now canonical fictions of male Windrush generation novelists writing at the mid-century. It attends to the nascent nationalism invoked by literary projects at the turn of the century, considers the role assigned to the writer in the short-lived project of Anglophone regional Federation between 1958 and 1962 that predated the constitution of nation states, and explores how Pan-African and Black Atlantic movements powerfully shaped the decolonial literary imagination in the early twentieth century. It also acknowledges the crucial role that women played in male-centred histories and politically engaged literary traditions.

Building on Achille Mbembe’s A Critique of Black Reason and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, emerging respectively from a francophone and anglophone tradition of Black critique, this chapter focuses on the profound importance of Blackness in the history of globalisation. Both writers argue Blackness needs to be understood in ‘worlded’ terms, with transnational dimensions and local inscriptions, and an emphasis on the interrelatedness of the world – its ‘systematic’ character. Moreover, each recognizes that in its engagement with imperialism, racialization, and the radical redefinition of subjectivity effected by capitalist modernity, Black writing pre-emptively grasps the spirit of globalization. As with the ‘one and unequal’ world literary system, Blackness shares a common basis in European colonialism and transatlantic slavery, but is also uneven, context-specific and immensely mutable, prohibiting any ‘total’ comprehension. Distilling a complex history into certain key topic areas, the chapter examines the significant international dimension of Black literary movements; the worlded and anti-colonial articulations of Blackness found in Négritude and the writing of Frantz Fanon; shifting Blackness in a neoliberal global order; and the afterlife and representational challenges of the foundational ‘world-system’ of slavery.

The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.