Ideas Matter: Framing Pan-Africanism, its Concept and History

Abstract

This article looks at the rich history of Pan-Africanism considering its many twists and turns and ambiguities in order to provide an original frame for tackling the writing of its unfolding – both in the sense of the Pan-African concept`s development and its realisation in history. Therefore, it contains an extensive treatment and a critical discussion of Pan-Africanism`s historiography from Geiss (1968) to Adi (2018).The article hints at some crucial aspects so far missing or being underrepresented in prevailing accounts, regarding convincing readings of the entanglements between global, colonial and metropolitan levels in the historiography of Pan-Africanism. It is argued, in particular, that more attention should be paid to existing global histories of nationalism and of global racial discourses, and to the interplay between modern (European) political categories and modern (African) Pan-African ways of reasoning. Moreover, the ambiguities and diversity of colonial situations should be taken into account in a more sophisticated manner than is the case. The article sketches how such a slightly different account of Pan-Africanism`s history in the 20th century could look like.

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