In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its
diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis,
Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of
transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The
aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought
and to discuss the new perspectives emerging from the ongoing projects
constructing political, cultural, and social imaginaries for and from
the African continent.
This book brings together and makes available to the English-speaking
world the material presented at the 2016 Ateliers de la pensée -
Workshops of Thought - in Dakar. The authors deal with a wide range of
issues, including decolonization, the development of social utopias, and
the pursuit of new forms of political, economic, and social production
on the African continent. Running throughout is a constant concern to
interrogate the categories and frames of meaning that have served to
characterize the dynamics of the African continent and a shared desire
to produce new frames of intelligibility through which to see Africa's
present realities and its future. The contributions also attest to the
view that there is no African question that is not also a global
question, and that the Africanization of the global question will be a
decisive feature of the twenty-first century.
To Write the Africa World and its companion volume The Politics of
Time will be indispensable for anyone interested in Africa - its past,
present, and future - and in the new forms of critical thought emerging
from Africa and the Global South.
