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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion |
| Author: | Bayart, Jean-François |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society |
| Volume: | 99 |
| Issue: | 395 |
| Period: | April |
| Pages: | 217-267 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Subsaharan Africa Africa |
| Subjects: | foreign policy dependence History and Exploration international relations |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/723809 |
| Abstract: | Considered in a view of history over the 'longue durée', Africa has never ceased to exchange both ideas and goods with Europe and Asia, and later with the Americas. The two key concepts by means of which the author examines the ambivalence, the differentiation and the dynamism of the relationship of Africa with the rest of the world, are location ('terroir') and action. Contrary to the dependency paradigm, the extraversion paradigm argues that Africans have been active agents in the 'mise en dépendance' of their societies. The author argues that the insistence on the central role played by strategies of extraversion in the way the relationship between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world is articulated offers a number of advantages; the paradigm makes us better equipped to understand the specific quality of Africa's own historical trajectories; it captures the dynamics of a dependence which is the reality of sub-Saharan Africa; and it bypasses a sterile distinction between the internal dimension of African societies and their insertion in the international system. Africa's current political struggles are not the result of a radical rupture, but are symptomatic of a historical line of continuity, namely a practice of extraversion. In this connection, it is appropriate to speak not of a marginalization of the subcontinent, but rather of an aggravation of its dependence. Ref. |
