Session Abstract

This panel moves beyond conventional nation-centered, colonial studies and Cold War approaches to explore the historical dynamic of decolonization in a decentered transnational fashion. The geographic locus of the three papers is the African continent, but each touches upon a variety of colonial and national sites, and questions how individuals and groups in these spaces experienced and engaged with events, processes, and ideas situated in a larger global field. Our inquiry stretches from the late 1940s to the 1970s – an era of tremendous political upheaval, transformation, and experimentation in sub-Saharan Africa and across the world.

As African territories under European rule transitioned to independent statehood, sometimes violently and almost always after administering authorities had violated international and national or colonial legal tenets, the nature of African political activists’ engagement with global politics changed markedly.  Yet only recently have scholars begun to reconstruct the ways in which Africans themselves viewed global politics – beyond their own territories and metropolitan centers – and then set about articulating these with more local daily realities in ways that often influenced the development of global discourses and political processes. In so doing, African political leaders and activists interacted with each other across regional and territorial boundaries to a greater extent than ever before.

The papers on this panel delve into these interactions and engagements. Jeffrey Ahlman investigates the Pan-Africanist agenda of the Ghanaian state under Kwame Nrumah’s rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, exploring both official and grassroots activism and debate vis-à-vis this internationalist project, and revealing the fluidity of conceptions and practices of political community during this period. Meredith Terretta examines how individuals and groups in former UN Trust Territories used the language of human rights to advocate for their interests in written petitions between 1948 and 1960, and in so doing claimed and popularized human rights ideas in unprecedented ways. Priya Lal analyzes the discursive and symbolic overlaps between the Tanzanian ujamaa project of the 1960s and other self-identified socialist projects on the continent, exposing some of the global and regional genealogies of African Socialism by focusing on transnational linkages towards the cause of anti-colonialism. Elizabeth Schmidt will provide commentary and facilitate discussion about the larger themes of the panel.

Our panel includes a diverse mix of scholars at various professional levels from a range of institutions in the U.S. and Canada. The papers we are proposing will be of interest to scholars specializing in various fields, including decolonization, the Cold War, nationalism, internationalism and postcolonialism, law and human rights, and socialism. Our individual works and our panel as a whole intersect well with the larger theme of this year’s Annual Meeting, “Lives, Places, Stories.” In particular, by illuminating the multi-layered connections between individuals across time and space, and between localities, regions, continents, and the world, our panel creatively engages with the notion of “place” through the lives of those most actively transcending regional, national, and political boundaries.