What could be called a digital turn has amplified conversations around publics, literary cultures, and African literature’s broadened genres. Drawing on conceptual frameworks and debates from literary, cultural, and media studies, Adeoba examines the literary imaginations and ekphrastic practices that emerge from the digital cultures of African Twitter users. Adeoba argues that crowdsourced verse demonstrates the creative agency of digitally connected everyday people and newer modes of sociality enabled by African poetry in digital contexts. Crowdsourced verse presents opportunities to examine the digital publics of African literature and their contributions to the body of literary works circulating in digital spaces.

African contemporary choreographers increasingly delink from Eurocentric performance conventions and work toward establishing local conditions of production and consumption by performing in public spaces. Although the labor undertaken to shift power asymmetries does not always result in structural changes, their art may be considered decolonial creative expression. Based on ethnographic research at the third and fourth editions (2022 and 2023) of Fatou Cissé’s street performance festival, La ville en mouv’ment (The City in Movement), in Dakar, Senegal, the author argues that decolonial potentiality extends beyond the precarious economic conditions to encapsulate the artists’ return to public space and futurist aesthetics.

The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

To date, there is no systematic research on the overlapping challenges of wildlife conservation and security in South Sudan, where the wildlife service (WLS) has institutionally survived for over a century while contending with poor state capacity and responsibility for protected areas (PAs) that cover vast territories characterized by chronic insecurity and food scarcity. Integrated into the country’s “Organized Forces,” South Sudan’s park rangers play roles beyond conservation as armed actors in complex conflicts. Data obtained from archival research and field interviews shows that South Sudan’s wildlife authorities have persisted since the colonial period in spite and because of chronic warfare.

Many studies on China-Africa encounters have demonstrated the significance of ethnic and racial identities in these encounters. I reverse this perspective and ask: in what circumstances are China-Africa encounters shaped by identities other than racial and ethnic ones? Drawing on my ethnographic research in the construction industry in Congo-Brazzaville, I argue that the actions of many Chinese are often more influenced by their economic roles, such as workers, managers, and entrepreneurs than by their ethnic identity. Their identities are thus realigned in the economic encounters which I term “project assemblages.” This concept highlights the fluidity of multiple identities in economic encounters and shows that China-Africa encounters are a fertile ground for producing theories, beyond the China-Africa framework, on lived experiences of economic relationships.

In the African Studies literature “transformation” emerges as a capacious discursive field and project of state power. In this Keyword article, I move from postindependence questions of transformative social change to violence as a transformative project of the nation-state, examining its imbrication with questions of transition and state aftermaths. I analyze transformation as a promise of worldmaking around horizons of the “post”: postapartheid, postconflict, and postcolonial. I then consider textures of transformative urbanism in changing African cities, and analyze processes implicated in reclaiming forms of discard, positing transformation as recuperation. Transformation is ultimately a multidirectional conceptual field capable of remaking personal worlds and theoretical orientations.

The concept of the organic serves as a keyword capturing emerging practices and epistemologies through which Africans navigate increasingly toxic lifeworlds. Noting a growing preoccupation with this term, the authors unpack its meaning based on their ethnographic fieldwork concerning two East African idioms: kienyeji and kiasili. What it means to be(come) organic is tied to older notions such as life flow, tradition, and the natural. Tracing how this concept engages with central themes in Africanist debates, the authors demonstrate that an Africanist theorizing about it foregrounds critical claims about the vitality of bodies and the viability of environments.

Instead of being merely a historical occurrence, colonization is a structural feature of civilizations that have been touched by colonialism, which affects the prospects for the colonial subjects. This process is still ongoing in various forms among the so-called postcolonial societies today. Therefore, decolonization is a response to both the negative stereotypes and falsehoods about Indigenous peoples and cultures as well as the structural injustices of colonially impacted society that disproportionately afflict Indigenous peoples. Even though decolonization is a hot issue in academia right now, Indigenous peoples have been fighting against colonialism for millennia and claiming their own spaces, sovereignty, and right to self-determination ever since they first came into contact with colonizers.

This review essay focuses on electoral politics and the African accountability struggle, which has gained interest and scholarly attention following the third wave of democratization. Before the Namibia Constituent Assembly elections in November 1989, many would agree that elections were neither acknowledged nor considered appropriate for selecting governmental and national leaders. However, the democratic wave in the early 1990s marked a substantial political shift in Africa. Elections, once rare, are now frequent, serving as a crucial tool for both development and accountability. In this new era, citizens have a rare opportunity to hold their leaders accountable and exert control over their behavior. This review specifically addresses two volumes: Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana by Noah L. Nathan and Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa, edited by Wale Adebanwi and Rogers Orock. Specifically, these volumes delve into topics concerning electoral politics and Africa’s challenges in achieving accountability.

This review essay explores the complex subject of peace in Africa by reviewing six volumes. While the African Union and the United Nations identify peace as providing the foundation for development, the quest for sustainable peace in regions of postcolonial Africa has remained elusive. Several works have sought to examine the contemporary pathways to peace currently being explored on the continent. The works under review must be located in this search for sustainable peace in Africa.