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Whereas leadership has existed on the continent of Africa as long as African peoples therein, the study of the same is limited in scope, depth and availability. Even as African scholars decry this dearth of available literature, they are at the same time actively involved in remedying the situation. In this chapter, the author attempts to answer a couple of questions: what is African about African Leadership? How can we engage in radical scholarship of African leadership? The author concludes with an invitation to readers of the edited volume to answer those two questions for themselves, as well as allow the chapters to help them rethink their own position and practices, arguing that leadership scholarship is always about both theory building and enhanced practice.

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

This chapter is one of five chapters dedicated to anti-racism, specifically focusing on its conceptual foundations. Drawing from critical scholarship on ideas that have inspired political debates and policies about racism, I address key questions pertaining to anti-racism as an idea, policy framework and as a catalyst for sociopolitical action. This chapter engages with the fundamental principles that underpin anti-racism endeavours, ranging from community engagement to political activism and civil rights movements. It critically examines the ongoing debates on whether the goals of anti-racism, such as racial justice and dismantling of institutional racism/privilege, align with existing sociopolitical order. In addition, this chapter contributes to anti-racism scholarship that has evolved over the past five decades, by synthesising how anti-racism relates to various societal goals. Furthermore, this discussion incorporates themes such as the promotion of tolerance, equality, social justice and recognition within the context of anti-racism.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

Can the crisis of women’s victimization in prison be represented in ways that challenge this harm without its self-perpetuation? As a documentary scholar and maker, this was my overriding concern for an activist video project about women and prison. Certainly, documentary and prison tell us much about each other in their shared capacity to weaken some and strengthen others, by way of technologies of vision and distance, while buttressing hegemonic power. Our project was to minimize the possibility of documentary as prison by taking responsibility for the victim documentary itself as a system of power and pain, objectification and punishment.

This paper shows that the collector (like the flâneur) is a decisive character in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, specifically in the manifestation of the historical materialist, yet the paper is not so much about the collector or collecting as it is about the commodity and the experience thereof in consumer society.

The section “The Dream World of Mass Culture” discusses mass culture and the central problem of commodity fetishism as Benjamin sees it. The section “A Physiognomist of ‘the World of Things’” discusses the critical task of the historical materialist actualized and made possible through an activity akin to collecting. The section “Collecting, Child’s Play, and Seeing Similarities” illuminates the central importance of the activity of collecting for Benjamin’s research regarding mass culture, historical materialism, and the experience of modernity itself. The final section explains and fleshes out the central concepts of the mimetic faculty and physiognomic perception for Benjamin.

I find that, ultimately, to understand the ability of the historical materialist to witness history critically, according to Benjamin, is to understand the historical materialist as a collector. To understand the revolutionary activity of collecting is to understand collecting as a manifestation of a fundamental activity of human nature, the inclination to become “like” or to become “similar.” But such an impulse grounds, for Benjamin, not only the activity of collecting but also collective experience, the collective conscious, mass culture, and the essence of the commodity itself as a sociocultural artifact. The paper demonstrates that the mimetic faculty is the primary human faculty Benjamin focused on in his theory of experience.

The originality of this paper lies in the fact that it illustrates the primary importance of the theory of the mimetic faculty, the notion of physiognomic perception, and the work of Heinz Werner to Walter Benjamin’s theory of commodity fetishism that to date has been largely underdeveloped. But, more importantly, the paper shows that Benjamin’s theory of experience could illuminate a path toward developing a theory of experience within a fundamental philosophical anthropology.