Politique Africaine: The joyous birth of a new and innovative academic sociability

Jean Copans was one of the founders of Politique africaine in 1980. In this paper, he provides both an account of his personal quarter-of-a-century involvement in its editing and a commentary on its original editorial aim and its evolutions. He emphasizes the ecumenical spirit of its management, which was both intellectual and multidisciplinary. He highlights that the journal’s objectives were trans-African in practice and later open to the diaspora, while tempering the idea that the “from below” perspective has been the journal’s exclusive conceptual framework. The various contexts of the journal’s production and reading have remained relatively stable over time, but Copans is not sure that it has had a profound impact on the development of autonomous African Africanist studies.