“The search for Western recognition is over. We need to move from it to claim our share and contribution to world history”. So declares Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and Director, Institute for African Studies, Columbia University, in this second edition of PQF, dedicated to African history and historiographical discourses and practices in a continental and trans-Atlantic frame. Mamadou’s framing of this session underpins the need to reconfigure African history and historiographical practices as responsibility, coming, as it were, in the wake of two weighty theses advanced recently by the latest distinguished entrants into the Professoriate of Eurocentrism: ‘Professors’ Nicolas Sarkozy of France and James Watson of the United States. Responsibility here is predicated on the need to move beyond habitual lamentations over the resilience of imperialist nostalgia, its epistemic violence, and the conditioned responses it occasioned in such African and Black internationalist praxes as Négritude and cultural nationalism. The point is to acknowledge Africa and its manifest unfoldings as the construction of multiple imaginaries and overlapping narratives spawned by Africans, Black Diasporans, and Europeans (and now the Chinese!), albeit with differing ideological motivations. This calls for careful attention to what Mamadou calls the politics and poetics of fragments as opposed to the counterproductive monolithizations that have characterized much of African(ist) historical discourse.

Moses Ochonu’s probing questions have been articulated in such a way as to take Mamadou through the various geographies and institutional contexts that have shaped his trajectory and scholarship. Consequently, Moses and Mamadou have succeeded in bridging gaps by bringing continental African, French, and American African Studies traditions into fruitful and mutually enriching contact. So have the perspicacious reflections of our respondents, Cary Fraser and Abosede George. In engaging Mamadou, Cary is keen on the possibilities that “the convergence between personal identity and professional trajectory raises” in terms of “the ways in which African history can be re-imagined within the context of the Atlantic World.” Abosede welcomes Mamadou’s submissions on the role of the intellectual, especially the academic historian, a role, she believes, has undergone mutations over the years in the face of shifting institutional and (cross)disciplinary dynamics. In Abosede’s estimation, the strength of Mamadou’s thesis lies in its ability “to radically democratize the relationship between academic historians and other history producers”.

Cary and Abosede raise numerous other posers for Mamadou and Moses ranging from the politics of knowledge production to the continent-Diaspora interface in African studies. It is in this sense that this current issue of PQF becomes intertextually linked to the first session with Ato Quayson and his respondents, Paul Zeleza and Olakunle George.

We wish our readers a pleasant reading experience in the hope that they will broaden and enrich this conversation by engaging Mamadou, Moses, Abosede, and Cary in our ‘Post Comments’ section.