Africa Is a Country

The West is no longer the motor of history

The West is no longer the motor of history

By
Sean Jacobs

The possibility of a new politics emerging from the new left social movements to reconfigure the nation state.

Image credit Alisdare Hickson via Flickr (CC).

In this video, University of California University at Los Angeles history professor Vinay Lal talks to the Indian website Newsclick about “the new movements developing in different parts of the world, whether in West Asia, North Africa to Europe and the United States. He sees the possibility of new politics emerging from this and how it can reconfigure the nation state.”

There’s also a Part 2 to the interview with Lal. It may be worth spending a day or two with Newslick interviews with experts to educate yourself on some refresher course for a third worldist understanding of global politics other than Western or non-hegemonic viewpoints on what gets covered as “international news.”

* Hat tip to Zunguzungu’s regular “Sunday Reading” posts, which I can never finish by the time the next Sunday comes around. Feels like graduate school again.

Further Reading

Fuel’s errand

When Africa’s richest man announced the construction of the continent’s largest crude oil refinery, many were hopeful. But Aliko Dangote has not saved Nigeria. The Nigerian Scam returns to the Africa Is a Country Podcast to explain why.

Fragile state

Without an immediate change in approach, Somalia will remain a fragmented country populated by self-serving elites seeking foreign patrons.

Coming home

In 1991, acclaimed South African artist Helen Sebidi’s artworks were presumed stolen in Sweden. Three decades later, a caretaker at the residential college where they disappeared found them in a ceiling cupboard, still in their original packaging.

Imaginary homelands

A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.

Business as usual?

This month, Algeria quietly held its second election since Abdelaziz Bouteflika was ousted in 2019. On the podcast, we ask what Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s second term means for the country.

The complexities of solidarity

Assassinated in 1978, Henri Curiel was a Jewish Egyptian Marxist whose likely killers include fascist French-Algerian colons, the apartheid South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.