Abstract

In studying Africa outside of Africa in the age of “global studies”, do we have to treat the continent as a dissimilar system to be able to give a robust account of the continent’s diversity, complexity as well as its presence in the ‘in-common’ of the world?

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Professor Wale Adebanwi is Director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is author of Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (UPR, 2016), Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (CUP 2014), and Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (CAP, 2012). He is the editor of seven volumes, most recently The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins (James Currey 2017); he is co-editor of AFRICA and former co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. He is also a visiting professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.