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This chapter explores how African American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany emerged in the 1950s as an outgrowth of the rise of American Studies in West Germany after World War II. It looks at several “generations” of scholars in African American Studies, including Charles H. Nicholas, Kenneth Stampp, and Edward Clark, and their respective research agendas. The chapter also considers the political and cultural situation in which the scholars‧ respective scholarship was undertaken, along with the impact of American financial support and international exchange programs. After discussing the development of African American Studies in connection with postwar cultural politics, it assesses the role of academic organizations such as the German Association for American Studies and the Collegium on African American Research. The chapter then analyzes the maturation of African American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the intersections between African American Studies and gender studies in German academic discourse since the 1980s. Furthermore, it reflects on the increasing internationalization of African American Studies, before concluding with some comments on current developments in the field.

This chapter explores the philanthropic interventions of the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation in Nigeria. These American foundations in the 1950s had thought of Africa as backward, barbaric, violent, and stagnant. But due to Africa's significance to Britain, an American ally, the Carnegie Corporation consequently catalyzed the development of African higher education and the founding of the African Studies Association in 1957, with a disproportionate focus on the white people of South Africa. The Rockefeller Foundation, whose initial focus was also on education, was far more interested in Africa's political and economic development later on. The Ford Foundation collaborated with U.S. state agencies and engaged in active institution-building programs, such as economic planning units at the University of Ife and behavioral sciences at the University of Ibadan. Although they were intended to alleviate poverty and “underdevelopment,” the foundations' achievements fell short due to the conflict of interests between African nationalists and British colonials.

This essay simultaneously provides a case study of moments of cultural and political crossover between African American liberation movements and the West German public in the Cold War period, and it offers some parameters for how to read the current fraught moment. It argues for a re-centering of African American Studies in the recent scholarly push to internationalize American Studies. It is concerned on many levels with civil rights, going beyond national, ethnic, and religious borders, and it connects some of these struggles to past and current debates about (white) women’s rights and religious freedom.

Judah Benzion Segal (1912–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a long career as a teacher of Semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Segal’s principal interest was in Aramaic and Syriac, in addition to Hebrew and the other main Semitic tongues. Before his teaching career, he was employed in the Sudan Civil Service and, during World War II, his service was frequently behind the enemy lines in North Africa. He was educated at Magdalen College School, University of Oxford, and at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. One of Segal’s other abiding interests concerned the Jews of Cochin whose history he published in 1993. But it will probably be in the area of Aramaic studies that Segal will be best remembered in the academic world.

‘Translating Africa in the French republic of letters’ is the concluding chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text as well as the book itself, and focuses on the role of translation as a further worldly aspect of literary mediation in the period of decolonization. The chapter suggests that translation depends not only on the relative position of languages, but on material conditions, shaped by the prestige of the translated author and, at times, the translator, and delineates writers’ and translators’ often strained relationships to notions of literary value during the decades of decolonization. By situating three translations in relation to the context of their publication and early reception, Bush considers the ways in which normative ideas of French as a literary language, bound up with the political transitions of this period, informed and accommodated translations of Anglophone African literature.

This chapter presents an essay on Reich's trip to Ghana, in summer 1970, to study drumming. With the help of a travel grant from the Special Projects division of the Institute of International Education, he traveled to Accra, the capital of Ghana, where he studied with a master drummer of the Ewe tribe who was in residence with the Ghana Dance Ensemble, the national dance company that rehearses daily in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana.

‘Book-publishing at Présence Africaine’ explores the extent of which the idealized notion of autonomy was transformed by the effects of decolonization on the Parisian publishing landscape. The chapter also reconsiders the radical nature of Présence Africaine’s early publishing work and its role in shaping notions of literary value in the period leading up to and directly following the independences.

‘Authenticity and authorship’ is the first chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text and explores how institutional conditions shaped and responded to notions of African authorial subjectivity in the early post-war period. The chapter builds on the primarily textual analyses of Jonathan Ngate and Michael Syrotinski, concerning narrative agency and African subjectivity, and approaches the discursive construction of an authorial subject in material terms.

‘Early Work and Recruitment’ is the first chapter in the section titled ‘Sailors and Workers’ and explores the Kru’s earliest experience as workers on European ships. Included in this chapter is a discussion on the slave trade era and the Kru’s role within it, and an assessment of the value of the Kru in the mercantile industry and the ways in which they were recruited.

‘Labour Conditions’ defines the working conditions experienced by the Kru, and describes the subsequent strikes, campaigns and petitions that followed as a resulted of poor treatment. The chapter highlights the dangers that a mercantile profession carried for the Kru, including risk of accident or death, lack of compensation, abuse, and poor living conditions.

The Introduction presents theoretical perspectives on the concepts of “morality,” “ethics,” and “Afropolitanism.” This chapter elucidates the social positions and existential projects that exemplify the book’s approach to ethico-moral personhood in Bamako’s Afropolitan music culture.

The Conclusion locates the foregoing study of Bamako’s musical art world within a broader conceptual framework, in which the Afropolitan ethics of a particular music culture may register meaningfully in other places, among other communities within an urban Africa at large.

‘Colonialism, Migration and a Diaspora in the Making’ explores the experience and labour of the Kru within the British shipping industry, and assesses the subsequent merging of their ethnic and occupational identity. The chapter also includes a comment on Liverpool’s involvement in the slave trade as well as highlighting the presence of British control of coastal areas of West Africa by the end of the nineteenth century.

This chapter is the first in the ‘Institutions’ section of the study, and considers the relative positions and strategies of selected editors who added literary voices concerning the Union française to their catalogues in the late 1940s. Editors included in Bush’s discussion are Paul Flamand at Le Seuil, Charles Fasquelle of Éditions Fasquelle, Charles-André Julien at Presses universitaires de France, and Guy Lévis Mano. Each assessment provides the opportunity to contemplate how anthologies and edited collections engaged with the politically volatile context of the Union française in a period marked by a sustained sense of both guilt and hope.

‘Editorial craft and literary resistance’ discusses the mediation of style and content of sub-Saharan African novels in the post-independence period through two examples: Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961) and Malick Fall’s much less studied La Plaie (1967).