This book offers a multifaceted portrait of Africa's resurgence after decades of postcolonial authoritarianism and underdevelopment. It explores the social and economic transformations of African societies over the past 50 years, the struggles for democratization and human rights including most recently the rise of the Arab Spring and its impact, the thickening circuits of regional interconnections and engagements with the diaspora most poignantly captured by the rise of the Obama phenomenon, and the shifting constructions and representations of Africa in the popular and scholarly literature. It is a bold reexamination of Africa's complex historical afflictions and legacies, its contemporary mixed fortunes, and of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the continent in a globalized world.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part 1: Domestic Transformations

1. Africa at 50: An Overview

2. What Happened to the African Renaissance? The Challenges of Development in the 21st Century

3. The Birth of the Billionth African

4. The Discovery of African Middle Classes and Afropolitanism

5. The Developmental and Democratic Challenges of Postcolonial Kenya

Part II: The Continuing Struggles for the Second Independence 

6. The Struggle for Human Rights in Africa

7. The Indictment of the Sudanese President: Justice or Neo-colonialism?

8. Freedom Struggles: Independence in the Sudan and Democracy in Tunisia

9. The Egyptian Revolution: The Third Act

10. The Fall of the Gadhafi Dictatorship: The Lessons for Africa and the Arab World

11. Malawi on the Brink: From The July 20 Movement to the Death of a Dictator

12. Mandela’s Long Walk with African History

Part III: Connecting and Diasporizing Africa

13. Sharing the Gifts of the Nile: The Struggle between Egypt and East Africa

14. Africa’s World Cup

15. The Internet Goes Multilingual: The Challenges for Africa and African Diasporas

16. In the Trails of the Historic Diaspora: Africa’s New Global Migrations and Diasporas

17. The Need to De-Atlanticize African Diaspora Histories

18. The British Urban Uprising of 2011

19. Remembering Abdias do Nascimento

20. Cry, the Beloved Country: The Tragedy of Haiti

21. In Search of Roots: The Return of Biological Races and Ethnicities

Part IV: Obama’s Africa

22. Obama, Africa, and African Americans

23. Obama in Cairo: Equivalences and Silences

24. Obama in Ghana: The Return of a Native Son

25. The Undistinguished History of the Nobel Peace Prize

26. Obama, Britain, Republicans, Kenya, and the Burdens of Race

27. Obama Revisits the Homeland: The Limits of Symbolic Power

Part V: Reframing Africa: Institutional and Intellectual Shifts

28. A Historical Accounting of African Universities: Beyond Afropessimism

29. Challenges in the Production and Globalization of African Knowledges

30. African Studies from a Global Perspective

31. The Quest for Science and Technology in Africa

32. Cultivating Academic Excellence: 

The Power and Promise of a Liberal Education

Epilogue

Index