Man of action
An interview with Brian Peterson, author of a new biography of Thomas Sankara. Peterson positions 1980s Burkina Faso as counterhegemonic to the neoliberal transition then.
7 Articles by:
Benjamin Talton
Benjamin Talton is associate professor of history at Temple University, executive board member of ASWAD and an editor on the African Studies Review.
Sankara is not dead
Thomas Sankara has emerged as both a lesson on the uncertainties of revolutionary change and the possibilities for people-centered development for the present and future.
The tragic delusions of white exceptionalism
At another historical inflection point, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized white Americans’ delusions as the property of the West more broadly.
Reading List: Benjamin Talton
The writer, a historian, on scholarly texts, novels, and memoirs that he consulted in writing a political biography of US congressman Mickey Leland and his solidarity politics in Africa.
African history on its own terms
There are far richer and complex stories to the Africa’s history than we think we know; especially the perspectives of African women.
The Mandelas at Harlem’s Africa Square
The Mandelas and Africa’s place in African American politics and popular culture.
Race politics in Ghana
Historian Jemima Pierre argues that Whiteness serves as a reference point for Ghanaians’ notions of beauty, Blackness, and power, but Ghanaians remain blind to this.