On critical African postsocialisms

Relative to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, scant attention has been paid to the fate of formerly socialist states in Africa. One reason is that postcolonialism has served as the default analytic frame for everything Africa-related. Another reason is the persistence of Three-Worlds ideology with postcolonialism associated with the Third World and postsocialism with the Second. A third reason stems from the claim that African states could not properly be socialist in the absence of capitalism or class struggle. Katherine Verdery’s scholarship on socialism and postsocialism in Eastern Europe, however, has served as inspiration for the emergence of critical scholarship on African postsocialisms. This growing field takes seriously commitments to and afterlives of socialist ideology and policy across the continent while also examining their successes, failures, contradictions, and effects in the present.