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Africa and Latin America secured independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America by the 1820s and most of Africa by 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political instability, violent conflict, and economic stagnation lasting for about a half-century. The parallels suggest that Africa might be exiting from a period of postimperial collapse and entering one of relative political stability and economic growth, as did Latin America almost two centuries ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in ‘studying’ anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholar-activists, by virtue of their critical engagement in the central issues of the day and their role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, have a unique opportunity to challenge the inherited orthodoxies in the academy and in the larger world in which we live. Within the field of African studies they have served as powerful critics and have broken new substantive, conceptual, methodological, and epistemological ground. To sustain this thesis, this essay explores three interrelated issues. First, it critically assesses the concept of value-free research—a notion which is commonly used to dismiss engaged scholarship as inherently flawed. Second, it documents how a number of African American scholars, passionately committed to social justice and to an end to racial oppression, produced pioneering work on Africa well before the field of African studies gained academic legitimacy in the post-World War II era. Finally, it highlights some of the critically important contributions that activist scholars have made to the study of Africa. The intellectual biographies of six prominent Africanists—Claude Aké Basil Davidson, Francis Deng, Susan Geiger, Joseph Harris, and Walter Rodney—illumihate how political commitment can fuel theoretical and methodological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features several books on African studies. Range of topics and issues relevant to African studies that were covered by the books; Author credits; Publisher information.

Introduces articles in the September 2001 issue of the journal 'African Studies Review.' Inclusion of archives of contemporary African life; Critical reviews of the most significant works written by African researchers living in Africa and published by international publishing houses; Social science research conducted in Africa.

Both rapid leadership turnover and remarkably durable leaders can be found side by side in African systems of personal rule. In order to explain differences in time in power among African leaders we employ life tables analysis and hazard models, a multivariate technique. We find that the risk of losing power is a decreasing function of time that is little affected by country or leader particularities. The best predictor of whether a leader will lose power in any given period is the length of rule up to that point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How sensibly can one talk of industrial sociology in a non-industrial continent? Industrial sociology has been called the ‘special’ sociology whose task should be to carry through scientifically the analyses of the social relationships and interactions present within the industrial organisation in all its theoretical depth and breadth.1 Raif Dahrendorf, for instance, in Industrie und Betriebssoziologie (Berlin, 1962), whilst accepting industrial sociology as one of the ‘special’ sociologies, makes the reservation that it is concerned with the industrial society. But since the whole process of industrialisation was a historical one, the limitation of industrial sociology to any specific period must be an open question, especially since every kind of society requires the production of goods and services through industrial organisation. Elsewhere I have questioned the premises and validity of Dahrendorf's assertion;2 but it must be admitted that in its present form this special sociology has little or no meaning for the pre-industrial societies largely because they have not yet been exposed to it as a scientific tool. Nevertheless, sociological researches in pre-industrial societies can demonstrate the operational use of industrial sociological categories, such as performance efficiency and incentives, managerial techniques, industrial commitment, and the effect of industrial work on personality, as will be shown below by surveying the work of C. H. Northcott, W. Elkan, and Y. Glass in pre-industrial societies of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a guide to the 2005 edition of the book "Africa Bibliography." Publications covered in this bibliography are of interest to students in the social and environmental sciences, development studies, humanities and arts. The main sources of data for this volume are noted. The types of entry contained in this bibliography are periodical articles, books and pamphlets and chapters.

With the disenchantment with independence in Africa, economic failure, the crimes of the elites from the independence years, the paralysis of symbolism, and finally the states' loss of dynamism, the 1990s ushered in a so-called phase of democratization. This was about rethinking citizenship and the relationship to politics. This democratization was a response to the notion of diversity. This paper claims that the answer to this diversity issue fell far short of expectations and proceeds different examples taken from social, cultural and political life, including the struggle for recognition and the appearance of terrorist violence in sub-Saharan Africa. Multiparty systems designed to respond to the diversity question produced only many versions of the same by ignoring that true diversity is the encroachment on the same of the strange, the different and the unexpected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]