The Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship is please to announce that in October 2022, Professor Adekeye Adebajo's edited volume,The Pan-African Pantheon : Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers (2021), was declared the winner of the 2022 ASR Prize for Best Africa-focused Anthology or Edited Collection, sponsored by Cambridge University Press

This award recognizes editors and contributors to an anthology of original scholarship, cohesive in structure and interdisciplinary in nature, that advances African studies in new theoretical and/or methodological directions. The award recognizes the editor(s) and also the contributors as a whole.

The edited volume aims to make a unique contribution to the literature on Pan-Africanism by providing lively biographical essays of 36 major Pan-African figures by a diverse and prominent group of African, Caribbean, and African-American scholars. The book also covers topics such as the history and pioneers of Pan-Africanism; the quest for reparations; politicians; poets; activists; as well as Pan-Africanism in the social sciences, philosophy, literature, and its musical activists.

The selection committee made the following observations in conferring the award:

The Pan-African Pantheon, edited by Adekeye Adebajo, provides in one remarkable volume over three dozen well-crafted essays on seminal pan-Africanist thinkers, activists, and organizers. The volume examines the history and development of Pan-Africanism as a transnational idea, an ideological movement, and a global practice, featuring figures as diverse and influential as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral to Arthur Lewis, Maya Angelou, C.L.R. James, Ruth First, Wangari Maathai, and Chimamanda Adichie. The two opening essays, one by Adebajo and one by Hilary Beckles, provide a comprehensive overview of Pan-Africanism as they investigate its emergence from the “twin plagues of European locusts” (the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism) through some of the successes of political and cultural movements informed by Pan-Africanist thought. But the essays also engage squarely with some of the failures of Pan-Africanism, particularly the failure to live up to some of its higher ideals in the post-colonial, neo-liberal world. The subsequent essays take a biographical approach to emphasize the humanism and personal struggles faced by these philosophers, artists, rebels, and activists as they tried, and sometimes failed, to build an internally coherent set of Pan-Africanist ideas. The essays provide original analyses written by scholars from multiple disciplines brought together in a deep investigation of Pan-Africanism’s trajectory over the last 150 years. The committee was honored to review it, and we hope it will enjoy a wide readership, especially in light of an Africa-based co-publisher.

You purchase the book on the Jacana Media website.