Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues and Dissensions

Zeleza's important and insightful collection of essays is essential reading for those seeking a more nuanced understanding of the global Pan-African significance of the election of President Barack Obama. This timely volume is a splendid contribution to African, Diaspora, and African American Studies, and to ongoing discourses in Pan-African scholarship. Zeleza's clarity of intellectual purpose, engaging prose, and clear-sighted grasp of global complexities of the interplay of politics, geography, economics, race, and gender dynamics in Pan-African Studies is a great illustration of the best rigorous critical analysis. This book will at once engender controversy and debate among public and academic intellectuals, and will simultaneously excite students and general readers. This is precisely what we expect from a provocative and wisely engaged African, Pan-African, African-American and Diaspora scholar. Darlene Clark Hine, Dept. of African American Studies, Northwestern University, USA.

Exploring the complex cultural and political forces behind the election of Barack Obama, Zeleza provides an exciting springboard to examine the economies of knowledge and the politics of representation of Africa. He is endowed with the gift of tracing Africa and its Diaspora's various conversations and confrontations across geographies, languages, religions, wars, leisure, poetics and politics. Mamadou Diouf, Columbia University, USA.

Zeleza combines a rare intelligence and a keen eye to produce a collection that is at once provocative and humane. Always passionate and informed by his own experiences as a Diasporic subject, his is a voice not to be missed. Dwight A. McBride, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.

A tour de force! From a brilliant interrogation of academic knowledge about Africa to an exploration of events in the African Diaspora, to an incisive dissection of the meanings and possibilities of an engagement on Africa by the Obama Administration. This book is a much needed reflection on globalization, the Global South and the future of the African continent. An enormous achievement. Kamari Maxine Clarke, Yale University, Chair of the Council on African Studies, USA.

In Barack Obama and African Diasporas, distinguished Professor of History and African American Studies, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, brings together in one volume twenty-seven essays whose scope is truly impressive, engaging matters African, Pan-African, Diasporic, and global. Africans have lived for generations keenly aware of how the larger world impacts on Africa. The need for African voices on African issues is crucial. In this book we are treated to the reflections of one of Africa's most erudite scholars. This is a must read for those interested in African affairs, Pan-Africanism, and Africa's relations with the wider world. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, Professor of History and African Studies,Harvard University, USA