Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Frank Gerits, "The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945-1966" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Frank Gerits, "The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945-1966" (Cornell UP, 2023)
In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them.
The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
View all episodes
By New Books Network
3.9
5757 ratings
In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them.
The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
More shows like New Books in Intellectual History
View all
Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)
496 Listeners
Philosophy Bites
1,532 Listeners
New Books in History
205 Listeners
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
2,086 Listeners
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
1,573 Listeners
New Books in Psychoanalysis
195 Listeners
New Books in Military History
158 Listeners
New Books in African American Studies
158 Listeners
New Books in Environmental Studies
18 Listeners
New Books in Political Science
62 Listeners
New Books in East Asian Studies
57 Listeners
New Books in Literary Studies
21 Listeners
New Books in Philosophy
111 Listeners
In Our Time: Philosophy
862 Listeners
The LRB Podcast
284 Listeners
New Books in Critical Theory
129 Listeners
Jacobin Radio
1,407 Listeners
Philosophy For Our Times
297 Listeners
Why Theory
537 Listeners
Hermitix
324 Listeners
Theory & Philosophy
342 Listeners
Acid Horizon
166 Listeners
What's Left of Philosophy
254 Listeners
Past Present Future
297 Listeners