Decolonizing 1968: transnational student activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar

Abstract

in small group interviews with subjects. The journey from having one’s racial ambiguity questioned to developing a political identity is extremely complicated and a discussion of the interviews’ content would have really offered unique personal insight to these processes. Lastly, the author could have used standard questions in South African voting studies that asks respondents how representative they think each party is, whether they think the ANC or DA represents all South Africans or only a narrow interest, and which of these parties they believe would govern the country best or be best able to solve the most important problems. I appreciate Harris’s concern for endogeneity and post-treatment biases in the analysis, but I was left wondering why subjects’ considerations of the parties’ representative capacities and evaluations of their performance in office (the ANC at the national level, the DA in the Western Cape) were not considered. The above should not be viewed as criticisms but rather as suggestions to advance the analytical and theoretical core developed in this book. The crux of this book impressively advances the study of race and ethnicity in African politics well beyond earlier more crude analyses that merely included demographic factors, which neglect to fully consider the construction of racial identity. This is a marvellous book on the role of race in politics, which can be extended to other cases globally, and should be on the reading list of anyone interested in these dynamic socio-political processes.