Guest Editor's Introduction

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Notes

¹I would like to thank the editors of Popular Communication for inviting me to guest edit this special issue.

²More recently in a book published in French, Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique Décolonisée (2010), Mbembe argued that “soon Africa will have more than a billion citizens – more than India […]. We are witnessing the emergence of an urban citizenry unseen in the region's history. The constitution of an enterprising diaspora, especially in the United States. The arrival of new immigrants coming from China and the rest of Asia. The formidable remodeling of mentalities, […] the religious revolution. All this calls for a new intellectual and political imagination which leaves me nonetheless optimistic.” He argues that if Africa wants to re-imagine itself it will have to look somewhere else than to Europe, which “seems to be gripped by an enormous desire for apartheid.” Europe seems infected by an “unclear fantasy of a community without strangers.” “I have the impression the world we live in is moving somewhere else. Europe is an important actor in the future world but we have to look somewhere else if we really want to re-open the future” (see translation by DeVriendt, 2010).