The Long Struggle: Discourses on Human and Civil Rights in Africa and the African Diaspora
The long and arduous struggle for human and civil rights is a defining theme in the historical experiences of African people and their descendants in the Diaspora. Challenges to fundamental human and civil rights continue to manifest in multiple dimensions, and are still critical issues in the political, economic, and social realities of black people. Featuring thirteen original chapters contributed by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, this book interrogates the complex dynamics of human dignity and rights within the global African context from a multidisciplinary perspective. By providing an integrated discourse on fundamental issues of human and civil rights such as state repression in the modern African state, women’s rights, minority rights, the right to education, and racial disparities and injustice in Black America, the book offers academics and the general reader a valuable resource to understand the historical and contemporary processes shaping human rights and freedom in the African world.
The book advances an important argument: that oppressive ideologies and practices which disproportionately victimize black people in Africa and in various diasporic locations have compelled the victims to develop a rich conceptual repertoire on rights as well as a robust vocabulary and a set of ameliorative methodologies for demanding and defending their human and civil rights. The most indelible contribution of this volume is that it insightfully and coherently weaves the struggles and sociopolitical experiences of African peoples in multiple spatial and temporal settings into current debates on human and civil rights. In this regard, the editors and authors clear a space for the universal idioms of rights to productively engage with the experience of and struggle for these rights in historically marginalized communities.
Moses E. Ochonu, Professor of African History, Vanderbilt University
A rare collection of definitive, compelling and discursive accounts of multifarious manifestations of the age long struggles of the Black race for human freedom and civil rights on both sides of the Atlantic, Adebayo Oyebade and Gashawbeza Bekele’s The Long Struggle: Discourses on Human and Civil Rights in Africa and the African Diaspora is authoritative, well conceived, and a major addition to the thin body of literature on the subject matter in Global African historiography.
Akin Alao, Professor of Legal History, Obafemi Awolowo University
Adebayo Oyebade is Professor and Department Chair of History at Tennessee State University.
Gashawbeza Bekele is Assistant Professor of Geography at Tennessee State University.