The present monograph is the first in the new book series Africa Multiple: Studies of Africa and its Diasporas. Launched by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence with Brill Academic Publishers, the overarching aim of the peer-reviewed series is to advance the study of Africa and its diasporas through offering a forum for multidisciplinary research. Encouraging critical reflections on area studies, it seeks to set new standards for collaborative research in the field, informed by an understanding of Africa as multiple that emphasizes relationality and reflexivity as its main conceptual approaches.
These approaches take center stage in the Africa Multiple Cluster, which was established as a large collaborative research structure in 2019 with the aim of reconfiguring African Studies in structural and conceptual terms. The Cluster is a transcontinental network comprising five locations, namely the University of Bayreuth and African Cluster Centers at Moi University (Eldoret, Kenya), Rhodes University (Makhanda, South Africa), the University of Lagos (Nigeria), and Joseph Ki-Zerbo University (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso).
The series is designed to overcome existing power imbalances in the production and transmission of knowledge in African Studies. As such, it pursues an open access policy and is particularly open to submissions from researchers in the Global South working in diverse fields and disciplines, which may range from social sciences, cultural studies and humanities to law, geography and beyond. As part of the programmatic objective of reconfiguring African Studies, we include publications in English as well as other academic languages relevant for African and African diasporic contexts, such as French, German, Kiswahili, Arabic, and Portuguese.
We are especially pleased to have Field Station Bahia by Livio Sansone as our inaugural volume, as it opens a window on key questions of academic knowledge production and is emblematic of the inclusion of African diasporic contexts into the purview of our series.
Our gratitude goes to Brill Academic Publishers, to the author, and to you as the readers, who will hopefully find the new series a timely addition to the ever-growing African Studies library.
Enocent Msindo and Rüdiger Seesemann Makhanda, South Africa & Bayreuth, Germany, December 2022