Travel and the Pan African Imagination

Tracy Keith Flemming is associate professor of area and global studies at Grand Valley State University.

When some of us feel we have had enough of Pan Africanism, this book is an enticing read not only for Africans but also for the White Westerners who can’t speak up. This vibrant African-centered scholarly work comes in handy in an overall attempt to highlight the perspectives of African studies by an African-American leaving the West as both an academic and Afrocentric agency—Afrocentricity. Tracy Keith Flemming provides readers with case studies of three Atlantic figures (Vesey, Crummell, and Blyden) to reposition discussions on Black subjectivity and Pan Africanism. Travel and the Pan African Imagination engages ongoing conversations about the role of the Church in the formation of a gendered Atlantic intellectual landscape, racism as masculinity and power centeredness—White men versus coloured—a novel approach to masculinity as visible, and how particular historical and social definitions have developed, where they came from, and the way forward.

• Introduction: Travel and the Pan African ImaginationChapter 1: Denmark Vesey, Armed Resistance, and the Emergence of Pan AfricanismChapter 2: Explorations of Christianity and Islam: Edward Wilmot Blyden’s Travels in Africa and the Middle EastChapter 3: “We need some African power”: Edward Wilmot Blyden and The Negro, or The Conservative Origins of Black Power IdeologyChapter 4: Anglo-Africans and Negro-Saxons: Writing the History of African Nationalism via Alexander CrummellConclusion: Africology and the New MillenniumSelected Bibliography