Arno Sonderegger – författare

Africa and its Historical and Contemporary Diasporas edited by Tunde Adeleke and Arno Sonderegger is an interdisciplinary study of the changing and complex nature of the Africa-Black Diaspora relationship. The contributors highlight the problems and challenges of this relationship and provide strategies for developing a more functional and mutually beneficial engagement in a radically changing global environment. This book presents new methodological approaches and research to study the many dimensions and complexities of Africa and its Diasporas. Collectively, this book addresses three vital themes. First, it foregrounds new and emerging forces reshaping the Africa-Black Diaspora nexus. Second, it highlights new and interdisciplinary approaches to “Diaspora” and “Pan-Africanism” (culture, religion, ideology, literature, philosophy, and epistemology). Third, it examines factors infusing the transformation in, and challenges of, African Diaspora and Pan-Africanist collaborations, and possible strategies of strengthening the relationship.

Afrika ist die Wiege der Menschheit. Doch eine kompakte Geschichte des geheimnisvollen Kontinents gab es bislang nicht. Afrika – der schwarze Kontinent? Keineswegs!Afrika ist bunt, vielfältig und uralt. Hier waren die ersten Menschen beheimatet, die später in alle Welt zogen. Nirgends reicht unsere Geschichte weiter in der Zeit zurück als in Afrika. Die "Kurze Geschichte des Alten Afrikas" setzt darum auch mit der Geburt des Menschen in Afrika ein und stellt frühe afrikanische Zivilisationen vor.Arno Sonderegger thematisiert kenntnisreich und kurzweilig die wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und kulturellen Diversifizierungsprozesse der letzten 100 000 Jahre afrikanischer Geschichte: die fortlaufende Besiedlung verschiedener Räume des Kontinents, das Wechselspiel zwischen aneignenden und produzierenden Wirtschaftsweisen, die Herausbildung verschiedener Formen von sozialer Komplexität. Der Band räumt so auch mit dem Mythos der Geschichtslosigkeit Afrikas auf und präsentiert Gesellschaften und Reiche, die dem in der eurozentrischen Geschichtsschreibung aufgewachsenen Leser größtenteils noch unbekannt sein werden.Kompakt und schlüssig werden alle Aspekte der Geschichte Afrikas von den Anfängen bis 1600 dargestellt.

This book shows the many facets of African engagements with the world. It starts from the premise that current global asymmetries ascribing Africa to a marginalized position are the effects of colonial and imperial pasts still lingering on. The decolonization process of the post-war structure which privileges the West in both political and economic terms. While new dependencies emerged, several old bonds were maintained and continue to influence African affairs quite strikingly. It is appropriate, then, to call these continued unequal relations between Africa and the West frankly ''neo-colonial''.This designation applies all the more as the post-colonial states of Africa inherited a complex legacy of foreign rule – colonial frontiers, colonial languages, colonial infrastructure and authoritarian institutions, as well as the social intricacies and imbalances so characteristic of the ''colonial situation''. The contributions to this volume look at various aspects of these complex processes from intellectual history perspectives. The topics dealt with are manifold. Contributions deliberately attack key themes, ideas and discourses of an intellectual history of Africa (''state'', ''modernity'', ''development'', ''dependency'', ''art'', etc.), and introduce important engaged public intellectuals from Africa and the African diaspora. What is Africa, and how is she related to the rest of the world? How can she overcome her internal problems and her external dependencies? – These are perennial questions critically tackled by Africans throughout the 20th century. Dealing with various cases looked at from a variety of perspectives, the contributions to this book offer original insights into the intellectual history of Africa.