African Studies Now

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Zimbabwean-born historian and a leading theorist of decolonial studies. He is Professor of History and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Pluralistic Societies at the University of Calgary in Canada. Previously, he was Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and he has also served in professorial roles at UNISA in South Africa.Eric Essono Tsimi is Associate Professor of Francophone African Studies at Northwestern University, USA. His research links literature, political culture, and the economies of publishing in Francophone Africa, with particular emphasis on racialization, editorial ecologies, and decolonial critique. He holds dual doctorates from the University of Virginia and from Université Grenoble-Alpes/Lausanne. A writer across genres including scholarship, fiction, and essays, he also contributes to public debate in venues such as Le Monde, Jeune Afrique, and The Conversation.Andrea Behrends is Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. Her work analyzes mobility, displacement, conflict, aid, and resource governance in African contexts, with long-term fieldwork in the Chad–Sudan borderlands and West Africa. Prior to Leipzig, she held the professorship in Social and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Africa at the University of Bayreuth, and she served as President of the African Studies Association in Germany (VAD) from 2021 to 2023.

Amidst ongoing debates around "decolonizing" academic disciplines––debates that have often remained focused on and in the Global North––African Studies Now offers a timely and critical intervention. Across an impressive range of disciplines (history, anthropology, philosophy, political science), this volume recentres African perspectives, rethinks approaches, and refreshes our conceptual vocabularies. Above all, the contributions assembled here assert Francophone Africa as a vibrant site of intellectual and cultural production: that is, where some of the most important and exciting conversations in African Studies are happening, right now.

• 01 . Introduction Éric Essono Tsimi, Andrea Behrends, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni02. Inheriting One’s Heritage: Restitution and Decolonization Seloua Luste Boulbina03. Overcoming Epistemic Coloniality: Reappropriating Self through Indigenous Knowledge Claude Abé04. Exploring the Interplay of Afropolitanism, Afro-Radicalism, and Afrocentricity: A Pan-African Approach from an Afrotropic Standpoint Mathias Éric Owona Nguini05. Racialization of the Arabic Language Through the Francophone Lens of Sansal Sana Alaya Seghair06. On the Entrapment of Francophone Africa Éric Essono Tsimi07. Decolonizing the Training Curricula in Social Sciences in Cameroon Estelle Kouokam08. Provisional Notes on Africa’s Political Epistemology Pélagie Chantal Belomo Essono09. The Motion of Memory: Cinema as Re-enactment in Postcolonial Healing Jean-Pierre Bekolo10. Reimagining African Scholarship: Epistemic Freedom, Decoloniality, and Transnational Perspectives Éric Essono Tsimi and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni11. A Conversation with Andrea Behrends on Travelling Models, Resource Management, and African Transformations Éric Essono Tsimi and Andrea Behrends12. Decolonial Currents and Mystical Traditions Brice Molo, Peter Geschiere, and Florence Bernault13. Afterword Amber Murrey