Rarely are students of African politics required to read the work of African intellectuals or even center the arguments of the very people under study. It is so often the case in academia that Africans are subjects of Western analysis through Western lenses for a Western audience. Therefore, the utility of African decision-making is valued only as far as it fits into Western models. For this and many reasons, Worldmaking after Empire is a refreshing take on African intellectualism. Getachew examines the assertion that rather than a nation-building project, which is so often the subject of much political theory, figures like C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, and Nnamdi Azikiwe were concerned with worldmaking.
Getachew describes worldmaking as a project that seeks to reorient global, political, and economic structures away from existing international hierarchies of domination. Citing the inaugural speech in which Nkrumah articulated his global goals—“‘Our independence,’ Nkrumah famously...
University of California Press