Abstract
Scholars and other commentators have largely characterized the histories of African nations in terms of failed states, economic underdevelopment, political corruption, and civil war. This introduction and the articles that follow demonstrate the utility of breaking out of the mold of measuring African “successes” and “failures” in terms of national politics and economics, without due consideration of local political histories, popular culture, and the arts, which offer a dramatically different view of Africa’s and Africans’ influences and success within the continent and on the global stage. Toward that end, this introductory essay advocates mitigating the standard analytical model through close studies of relationships between Africans and people of African descent in which politics and economic “development” are placed alongside the arts, popular culture, and sports, with a particular emphasis on the critical decade of the 1960s as central to shaping the course of “postcolonial” African histories.
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