To Write the Africa World

In October 2016, thirty thinkers, intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas and beyond came together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa at the heart of transformations 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 of 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 Pensee - Workshops of Thought - in Dakar. The texts 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. The contributions display a constant concern to interrogate the categories and frames of meaning which 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. They also attest to the view that there is no African question that is not also a planetary question, and that the Africanization of the planetary 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 works 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.