Events

Merve Fejzula will examine the social, political, and economic conditions for the emergence of West African publics in the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Fejzula will trace the key transformations in production and social reproduction that enabled publics to flourish - the transition to a cash crop economy and the shift in social reproduction "after" enslavement. These two developments are often disconnected from the intellectual histories of publics. By reconnecting political economy to intellectual history, we can, however, answer key questions about why West African publics took the particular political, gendered, and ideological shapes they did at the turn-of-the-century, while also challenging key concepts in public sphere history and theory.